Timeouts, Retries, Breakers and Bulkheads

1. Four Patterns That Only Work Together

Timeouts, retries, circuit breakers and bulkheads are usually taught as four independent things to add. In a real request path they interact, and three of the four make the system worse when applied alone.

The interactions are the content of this lesson.

• A timeout without a retry turns a transient blip into a user-visible failure.
• A retry without a budget turns an overload into a much larger overload.
• A circuit breaker without a fallback converts a slow failure into a fast one, which is better but is still a failure.