Retry with Backoff & Jitter
🔴 P0 — the default error recovery mechanism; Stripe definitely asks about this
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309 words·
2 mins
- rtshkmr's digital garden/
- References/
- Architecture Design Basics/
- Pattern Taxonomy/
- Reliability, Consistency & Synchronisation/
Reliability, Consistency & Synchronisation
How distributed systems maintain correctness, recover from failures, and coordinate. This section merges reliability (fault tolerance) with consistency (data correctness) because they are inseparable in practice.
| Pattern | Priority |
|---|---|
| Consistency Models | 🔴 P0 |
| CAP Theorem & PACELC | 🔴 P0 |
| Quorum Reads & Writes | 🔴 P0 |
| Raft Consensus | 🟠P1 |
| Two-Phase Commit (2PC) | 🔴 P0 |
| Saga Pattern | 🔴 P0 |
| Timeout Strategies | 🔴 P0 |
| Circuit Breaker | 🔴 P0 |
| Retry with Backoff & Jitter | 🔴 P0 |
| Bulkhead Isolation | 🟠P1 |
| Ordering & Causality | 🟠P1 |
Circuit Breaker
🔴 P0 — prevents cascading failures by stopping calls to a failing service
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403 words·
2 mins
Two-Phase Commit (2PC)
🔴 P0 — the classical distributed transaction protocol and why it’s limited
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256 words·
2 mins
CAP Theorem & PACELC
🔴 P0 — the foundational impossibility result and its more nuanced successor
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330 words·
2 mins
Consistency Models
🔴 P0 — the spectrum from linearisability to eventual consistency
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235 words·
2 mins
Ordering & Causality
🟠P1 — how distributed systems reason about “what happened before what”
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265 words·
2 mins
Bulkhead Isolation
🟠P1 — isolating failures so one component’s problems don’t sink the ship
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144 words·
1 min
Timeout Strategies
🔴 P0 — the most fundamental reliability mechanism; every network call needs one
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296 words·
2 mins
Saga Pattern
🔴 P0 — the distributed transaction pattern for microservices; critical for Stripe payment flows
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238 words·
2 mins
Raft Consensus
🟠P1 — the understandable consensus algorithm; know conceptually, not implementation details
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175 words·
1 min