What you will learn
- Plan capacity
- Use retries, timeouts, circuit breakers
- Design for failure
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The basics, in plain English
Capacity planning means making sure you have enough computing power to handle expected demand, without buying far too much. Reliability patterns are proven design tricks, like retries and backups, that help systems keep working when parts fail. Together they prepare you for both growth and trouble.
- Capacity
- How much work your system can handle before it slows or breaks.
- Capacity planning
- Predicting future demand and making sure you have enough resources.
- Headroom
- Spare capacity kept in reserve for unexpected spikes.
- Redundancy
- Having backup parts so one failure does not take everything down.
- Failover
- Automatically switching to a backup when the main part fails.
- Graceful degradation
- Losing some features instead of crashing entirely when overloaded.
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Resilience patterns
Timeouts, bounded retries with backoff, circuit breakers, and load shedding keep systems alive under stress. Assume dependencies will fail.
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