The Bulkhead Pattern
Learn how the bulkhead pattern isolates resources so a failure in one part of a system cannot exhaust shared resources and bring down the whole application.
What Is a Bulkhead?
The name comes from ships: a hull is divided into watertight bulkhead compartments. If one floods, the others stay dry and the ship survives.
In software, the bulkhead pattern isolates resources so a failure in one area cannot sink the entire system.
The Problem It Solves
Imagine one slow downstream service. If all requests share a single thread pool, requests to the slow service consume every thread. Soon healthy services cannot get a thread either. One failure cascades into total outage.