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Failing safely

Module 9 of the System Design Masterclass. Every lesson here is free to read, with no account.

  • 4 lessons
  • 1 h 28 min of reading
  1. 54Timeouts, retries, backoff and jitterHow to set a time limit on every call, when to try again, how long to wait between tries, and how retries can turn a small problem into a storm.24 minCore Fast track
  2. 55Stop calling a broken service (circuit breaker, bulkhead)How a circuit breaker stops calls to a service that is failing, how a bulkhead gives each service its own workers, and why one slow service must not use all of them.12 minDepth
  3. 56Rate limiting: token bucket, leaky bucket, sliding windowHow to limit the requests one user can send, with five counting methods (fixed window, sliding window log, sliding window counter, token bucket, leaky bucket) and what each one costs.24 minCore Fast track
  4. 57Case study: Rate limiter for many serversHow to make a rate limit hold when a client's requests reach many servers: shared counters in Redis, atomic steps, speed and size, quotas, and what an attacker does.28 minCore · Case study Fast track

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