Circuit Breaker

Reliability

Circuit Breaker

After N consecutive failures, stop calling a dependency for a cooldown, then probe with a half-open state.

Why interviewers ask about it

Gives a struggling dependency room to recover instead of holding it underwater with continued traffic.

Retry Budget

Capping retries as a fraction of total traffic rather than as a fixed count per request.

Bulkhead

Bounded, separate resource pools per dependency so one slow dependency cannot starve the others.

This term is part of the free System Design interview preparation module - browse the full glossary for every definition.