Glossary term
What is Bulkhead? Meaning for developers
In System Design
Separate resource pools so one failure can't sink everything. Example: A ship's watertight compartments.
Learn it properly · System DesignLesson 42: Circuit Breaker & Bulkhead PatternsTimeouts limit how long you wait per call, but not how often you keep calling a service you already know is dead. How circuit breakers fail fast and test for recovery, how bulkheads stop one dependency exhausting everything, and how to design honest fallbacks.In Scenario Debugging
A separate pool of resources for each dependency. If one dependency fails, it cannot use up everything.
Learn it properly · Scenario DebuggingLesson 10: Production Incidents: Step-by-Step GuideDetect, reduce the harm, find the cause, tell people, fix, learn. Roll back first, roles and severity, and eleven incident cases from latency that doubled overnight to a vulnerability found in production.In Observability & SRE
A separate resource limit for each dependency, so one slow dependency cannot use up everything.
Learn it properly · Observability & SRELesson 7: Reliability Patterns: Timeouts, Retries, Circuit Breakers and Graceful DegradationFailure modes, timeouts and retries with backoff, circuit breakers, bulkheads, load shedding, tested with fault injection.