If you build or operate production systems, this article is a practical, engineer-friendly guide to the reliability patterns that keep services alive under real-world failures—with clear explanations of retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, and bulkheads, plus how to apply them without causing retry storms, cascading failures, or hidden latency spikes.
Most outages don’t start as “big failures.” They start as small slowdowns that cascade. These patterns help you stop the cascade:
✅ Retries → only when safe (use backoff + jitter, retry budgets, and idempotency)
✅ Timeouts → set strict limits (no infinite waits; align client/server timeouts)
✅ Circuit Breakers → fail fast when dependencies degrade (protect latency + threads)
✅ Bulkheads → isolate blast radius (separate pools/queues per dependency or tier)
#ReliabilityEngineering #SRE #DevOps #DistributedSystems #Microservices #Observability #Cloud #Kubernetes #Resilience #IncidentManagement
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