Bulkhead

Elements of an application are isolated into pools, so that If one fails, the others will continue to function. 

When to use this pattern?  

• Isolate resources used to consume backend services.  

• Isolate critical consumers from standard consumers.

• Protect the application from cascading failure. 

When NOT to use this pattern?  

• Less efficient use of resources.

• The added complexity is not necessary.

Design Approach

1. Option 1: Use a dedicated container for each consumer.

2. Option 2: In case of service chaining, use async communication between the service call.

Considerations  

• Level of isolation.

• Combine with retry, circuit breaker, and throttling patterns.

• Consider processes and thread pools.  

• Deploying into separate VMs, containers, or processes.  

• Asynchronous communication  

• Level granularity.

• Monitoring.