Building Resilient Architectures
Applications will fail. Databases will lock up; APIs will rate-limit. To prevent a single error from cascading and crashing the entire platform, we implement engineering patterns of resilience: Rate Limiters, Circuit Breakers, and Exponential Backoff retries.
The Circuit Breaker pattern: If a downstream service fails repeatedly, the breaker trips (opens), returning instant errors instead of letting requests accumulate, preserving system resources.