Circuit Breakers Under Stress: Anatomy of a Payment Cascade

Your insights and recommendations are incredibly valuable for anyone working on building resilient systems, especially in the context of microservices architecture and dealing with third-party dependencies like Stripe. Here’s a summary of your key takeaways along with some additional points to consider:

Key Takeaways

1. Trip on Latency, Not Just Errors

   • Why: A slow but responsive service can still cause issues by blocking threads in your system.
   • Implementation: Use slowCallRateThreshold and other latency-based metrics to detect performance degradation early.

2. One Bulkhead Per Downstream Dependency

   • Why: Coarse-grained thread pools can lead to cascading failures when different dependencies behave differently under load.
   • Implementation: Define separate bulkheads for each downstream service, ensuring isolation even if one dependency fails.

3. Synchronous Chains Across Third-Party APIs Are Tech Debt

   • Why: Synchronous calls introduce latency and potential failure points that can degrade user experience.
   • Solution: Use an outbox pattern with asynchronous messaging (e.g., Kafka) to handle third-party API calls separately from the main request flow.

Additional Recommendations

1. Monitor Custom Metrics for Autoscaling

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