Reliability

Timeout fundamentals for software: why timeouts exist, connection vs read vs write, choosing values, and avoiding cascading failures in distributed systems.

Exponential backoff is a retry strategy that increases wait time between attempts. Learn why it exists, how it works, and when to combine it with jitter.

Software availability explained: uptime metrics, redundancy patterns, health checks, and graceful degradation for keeping systems accessible.

Jitter is timing variation that creates bursts and tail latency. Understand measured jitter, backoff jitter, and why it matters in retries.

Retry storm: when retries multiply load and turn partial failures into outages. Learn how they happen, how to detect them, and how to prevent them.

Thundering herd: when many clients do the same work at once and overload a dependency. Understand why it happens, what it looks like, and how to reduce risk.

Backpressure: a system’s way of saying “slow down” before overload turns into timeouts and retries. Understand why it matters and what signals it uses.

Load shedding rejects work during overload so systems stay usable. Learn why it matters, what it looks like, and how it prevents retry storms.

Understand reliability engineering fundamentals: how to define SLOs and error budgets, design reliable systems, balance reliability with innovation, and make data-driven decisions about system reliability.

Understand incident management fundamentals: how to respond effectively when systems fail, build runbooks that work, create actionable alerts, and prevent incidents before they happen.