Backpressure Explained: Flow Control for Distributed Systems
What backpressure is, why a slow downstream takes down a whole system without it, and how to apply it with bounded queues, rate limiting, and load shedding.
Consuming Rate-Limited APIs: Handling 429s in Production
How to consume rate-limited APIs safely: read RateLimit headers, handle 429s with backoff, and monitor throttled dependencies before they break your app.
Dead Letter Queues Explained: Handling Failed Messages
What a dead letter queue (DLQ) is, why messages end up there, and how to monitor, alert on, and reprocess them so failed events don't vanish silently.
Circuit Breaker Pattern: Failing Fast to Stay Resilient
How the circuit breaker pattern stops a failing dependency from cascading into a full outage: the closed, open, and half-open states, and what to monitor.
Retry Storms: Exponential Backoff and Jitter Explained
Why naive retries turn a blip into a retry storm, and how exponential backoff, jitter, and retry budgets stop a system from amplifying its own failures.
Graceful Degradation: Designing Systems That Fail Well
What graceful degradation means, how it differs from fault tolerance, patterns like fallbacks and circuit breakers, and how to monitor a degrading system.