Reliability

🟠 P1 — how distributed systems reason about “what happened before what”

🟠 P1 — isolating failures so one component’s problems don’t sink the ship

🔴 P0 — the default error recovery mechanism; Stripe definitely asks about this

🔴 P0 — prevents cascading failures by stopping calls to a failing service

🔴 P0 — the most fundamental reliability mechanism; every network call needs one

🔴 P0 — the distributed transaction pattern for microservices; critical for Stripe payment flows

🔴 P0 — the classical distributed transaction protocol and why it’s limited

🟠 P1 — the understandable consensus algorithm; know conceptually, not implementation details

🔴 P0 — the mathematical foundation for consistency in replicated systems