Distributed-systems

How circuit breakers contain cascading failure in microservices, with practical guidance on thresholds, fallback behavior, and production metrics.

Why adding more instances does not always improve throughput when shared state, coordination costs, and contention remain the real bottleneck.

Why timeouts limited waiting but failed to contain system-wide overload, leading to cascading failures under production load.

Why read replicas often fail to reduce database load when coordination costs, consistency guarantees, and hidden coupling keep pressure on the primary.

Retry logic can improve reliability, but in real systems it often amplifies failures, increases load, and turns partial degradation into outages.