Reacting to Backpressure
Explore how distributed systems clients can effectively react to backpressure by applying retries strategically, using exponential backoff combined with jitter, and implementing circuit breakers to avoid service overload. Understand how timeout hints help downstream applications manage workloads. This lesson helps you master practical techniques for minimizing failure impacts and designing resilient distributed systems.
Clients of an application should be able to react properly to the backpressure emitted by an application.
Retries
The most typical way to react to failures in a distributed system is retries. Retries are performed because we assume that a failure is temporary, so retrying a request is expected to have a better outcome.
Issue with retries
Retries can have adverse effects, the one is described below:
Overloading a service
Think about the whole architecture of the systems and the various applications involved to determine where retries will be performed. Performing retries at multiple levels can significantly amplify the traffic coming from customers, which can overload services and cause issues.
For example, let’s assume we have four ...