Failure Handling Patterns in Distributed System
Failure handling patterns in distributed systems are essential for ensuring system resilience, fault tolerance, and recovery in the face of failures. These patterns help detect, isolate, and recover from failures to maintain system availability and consistency.
- Retry:
- Retry patterns automatically retry failed operations or requests with the aim of eventually succeeding.
- Exponential backoff strategies gradually increase the delay between retries to avoid overwhelming the system and to give it time to recover from transient failures.
- Circuit Breaker:
- Circuit breaker patterns monitor the health of services or resources and prevent further access to them if they are deemed to be failing or unhealthy.
- Once the circuit is “open,” subsequent requests are rejected immediately, reducing the load on the failing resource and preventing cascading failures.
- After a specified period of time or after the resource becomes healthy again, the circuit may automatically close, allowing requests to resume.
- Bulkhead:
- Bulkhead patterns isolate components or services from each other to prevent failures in one part of the system from affecting others.
- By partitioning resources, such as threads, connections, or pools, failures in one partition are contained, ensuring that other parts of the system can continue to operate.
- Failover:
- Failover patterns involve switching to backup or secondary resources when primary resources fail.
- Active-passive and active-active failover configurations are common, with active-passive setups having a standby resource ready to take over in case of failure, while active-active setups distribute load across multiple active resources.
- Graceful Degradation:
- Graceful degradation patterns allow systems to continue functioning at a reduced capacity or with limited functionality in the event of failure.
- By prioritizing critical operations and gracefully handling non-essential features or services, systems can maintain basic functionality during failure scenarios.
Distributed System Patterns
Distributed system patterns are abstract ways of structuring a system that helps developers solve recurring design problems. They provide proven solutions that can be reused across different applications and help developers make informed decisions and avoid common pitfalls. In this article, we will see some distributed systems patterns that help designers make robust and efficient systems.
Important Topics for Distributed System Patterns
- Communication Patterns in Distributed System
- Data Management Patterns in Distributed System
- Concurrency and Coordination Patterns in Distributed System
- Failure Handling Patterns in Distributed System
- Scaling Patterns in Distributed System
- Deployment Patterns in Distributed System
- Security Patterns in Distributed System