Designing Resilient APIs

APIs should fail gracefully and recover predictably. Techniques like circuit breakers, bulkheads, and retries with jitter reduce cascading failures and improve availability.

Core Patterns

  • Timeouts and proactive circuit breakers

  • Idempotent endpoints to safely retry

  • Bulkheads for resource isolation

Testing

Chaos testing and synthetic traffic validate fallback strategies and reveal brittle dependencies.

Operational Advice

Monitor tail latencies and error budgets; iterate on SLOs to align engineering priorities with customer impact.