In a distributed system, failure is the default state. Networking is flaky, disks die, and downstream services lag.

To build systems at scale, you don’t try to prevent failure; you design to survive it.

The Reliability Mindset

1. Isolate Failure: Ensure a crash in one component doesn’t take down the entire system.
2. Expect Latency: Every network call is a potential hang.
3. Trust Nothing: Design with the assumption that every dependency will fail.

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Core Primitives

We use a set of fundamental tools to achieve this resilience:

• Idempotency: Ensuring retries don’t cause duplicate side-effects.
• Retries & Jitter: Spreading out load when trying again.
• Circuit Breaking: Stopping requests to a failing service.

Advanced Patterns

For a deep dive into Staff-level reliability patterns like Bulkheads, Shuffle Sharding, and Retry Budgets, see the dedicated module:

👉 Module 6: Core Reliability Patterns