Series
Posts written to be read in sequence.
Resilience in practice
How distributed systems deal with failure, from retries to circuit breakers, and when it is time to stop insisting.
System Design
System DesignWhy can retries bring down your system?When retries help and when they make an outage worse: transient and permanent failures, how many attempts to make, limits and idempotency.Jul 28, 2026 · 4 min readSystem Design
System DesignExponential Backoff in PracticeIn this article we will understand how Exponential Backoff works in practice, and how it can be used to reduce the pressure on degraded services.Aug 1, 2026 · 5 min readSystem Design
System DesignCircuit Breaker: when should you stop trying?How the Circuit Breaker stops calls to services that are already failing, its closed, open and half-open states, and how to combine it with retry.Aug 5, 2026 · 5 min read