As systems grow, so does the probability of failure.
In 2013, I was deep into building pipelines that needed to survive crashes, partial state, and retries. We stopped aiming for “no failure” and instead built for failure tolerance.
Some patterns that worked:
- Circuit breakers with dynamic thresholds
- Retry queues with dead-letter handling
- Backpressure propagation
We started to think of our systems less like chains and more like webs—resilient because of their structure, not in spite of it.