LESSON 4.2
Timeouts, retries, and circuit breakers
Learn key techniques and workflows in System Design Foundations.
4m
intermediate
7,134 students
Overview
A dependency that hangs is worse than one that fails. Timeouts convert hanging into failing, and circuit breakers stop failure spreading.
In this lesson you will:
- Set timeouts on every outbound call
- Break the circuit when a dependency is clearly down
- Degrade gracefully instead of cascading
Pro Tip
Use caching and revalidation wisely to ensure your app stays fast and data remains fresh without unnecessary requests.