Design Patterns for Fault Containment

Fault containment is an important constituent of fault tolerance. Means for fault containment allow a system to limit the impact of manifested faults to some predefined system boundaries. This document presents some of the best known techniques for fault containment formatted as design patterns. These patterns are elicited from the areas of self-stabilization, specification closure and fault tolerant OS kernels. The presented fault containment patterns are: the Input Guard pattern which confines an error outside the guarded system boundaries; the Output Guard which confines an error inside the guarded system boundaries; and the Fault Container pattern which is the fault tolerant counterpart of the well-known Adapter pattern and which combines the properties of the Input Guard and Output Guard patterns.