Circuit Breaker Pattern in Microservices: Timeouts, Retries, Limits
How cascading failures spread between services, and how to design timeouts, deadline propagation, retry budgets, bulkheads and circuit breakers together.
19 min read
Category
Microservices
Service boundaries, communication, data ownership and the operational reality of distributed systems.
Idempotency Keys in Microservices: Making Retries Safe End to End
Learn how to mint, propagate, and enforce idempotency keys across microservices so retries, redeliveries, and timeouts never cause duplicate side effects.
16 min read
Transactional Outbox Pattern: Reliable Events from PostgreSQL
Solve the dual write problem in PostgreSQL with the transactional outbox pattern: table design, polling and CDC relays, idempotent consumers and ordering.
15 min read
Service Discovery in Microservices: How Load Balancing Really Works
Learn how service discovery and load balancing fit together in microservices: DNS, Kubernetes Services, client-side balancing, proxies, and rollout pitfalls.
13 min read
API Gateway vs Backend for Frontend: Choosing the Edge Layer
Learn how API gateways and BFFs split edge responsibilities, when to use one or both, and how aggregation, latency, ownership and GraphQL change the design.
13 min read
Kafka Consumer Lag: Diagnosing and Fixing Slow Consumers
Learn to read per-partition Kafka consumer lag, tell processing limits from skew, rebalances and traffic spikes, and choose the right fix.
15 min read
Dead Letter Queue Guide: Handling Poison Messages Safely
Learn to classify poison messages, cap retries with backoff, capture failure context, and run safe, idempotent DLQ replay with owners and alerts.
16 min read
Service Mesh: Do You Actually Need One? A Practical Guide
Learn what a service mesh does, how mTLS between services works, Istio vs Linkerd, real costs and trade-offs, and when Kubernetes alone is enough.
13 min read
Feature Flags in Microservices: Safe Rollouts Without Redeploys
How feature flags work across microservices: evaluation architecture, cross-service consistency, kill switches, safe defaults, progressive delivery and flag cleanup.
13 min read
Service Discovery in Microservices: DNS, Registries and Kubernetes
Learn how service discovery works with DNS, service registries and Kubernetes Services, and how to choose by staleness, failure and coupling trade-offs.
18 min read
Eventual Consistency in Practice: Guarantees Across Services
Learn which consistency models your services need, how to fix dual writes with outbox and CDC, build read-your-writes, run sagas, and monitor staleness.
14 min read
Backend for Frontend Pattern: When a BFF Beats a Shared API
Learn how the backend for frontend pattern works, how a BFF differs from an API gateway, how to implement aggregation safely, and when to skip it.
12 min read