Practice vocabulary for inter-service reliability: bulkhead pattern, timeout chains, cascading failures, retry storms, exponential backoff, and failure isolation.
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What does the 'bulkhead pattern' do in a microservices system?
The bulkhead pattern (named after ship compartments) isolates failures — if one service exhausts its thread pool or connection pool, it doesn't cascade to others.
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A developer says: 'The ___ storm overwhelmed the downstream service.' What word is missing?
A 'retry storm' occurs when many upstream services simultaneously retry failed requests, amplifying load on an already-struggling downstream service.
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'We implemented exponential ___.' Which word completes this?
'Exponential backoff' means doubling (or multiplying) the wait time between retry attempts, reducing load during incidents and preventing retry storms.
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What is a 'cascading failure' in distributed systems?
A cascading failure happens when one service's failure propagates through dependency chains, causing multiple services to go down in sequence.
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'We need to ___ the failure so it doesn't spread to other services.' Which verb fits?
'Isolate' is the standard verb for failure isolation — containing a fault within its origin service to prevent it from affecting the broader system.