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Circuit Breakers and Backpressure

A circuit breaker stops calling a dependency that is already failing, so one sick service does not drag down everything that depends on it. Backpressure is the upstream half of the same fight: when a downstream cannot keep up, you signal callers to slow down or shed load instead of piling work into an unbounded queue.

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RELATED CONCEPTS

Retries, Exponential Backoff and Jitter Rate Limiting Idempotency Latency Optimization

LESSONS THAT TEACH THIS

Foundations of Forward Deployed EngineeringTest replay, slow dependencies and changing data before adding load30 min→Foundations of Forward Deployed EngineeringChoose retries from outcome evidence and a time budget30 min→Foundations of Forward Deployed EngineeringInvestigate undocumented behavior with bounded evidence28 min→

PRACTICE THIS IN REAL QUESTIONS

System Design & Production EngineeringWhat is a dead-letter queue, and how do you handle a poison message in production?→LLM & GenAI FundamentalsWhy do LLMs hallucinate?→LLM & GenAI FundamentalsGive me three concrete hallucination mitigations, and the cost of each.→System Design & Production EngineeringDesign a job queue for long-running LLM tasks, priorities, cancellation, progress, and poison messages.→LLM & GenAI FundamentalsWhat are the failure modes of tool/function calling, and how do you handle them in production?→LLM & GenAI FundamentalsYou need guaranteed JSON from the model, but it keeps breaking the schema. What do you do?→