Bulkhead Pattern

In a microservices architecture, a single application is broken down into dozens or hundreds of independent, collaborating services. While this design improves modularity and scalability, it also introduces a major risk: a failure in one service can cascade and bring down the entire system. If a downstream service becomes sluggish or unresponsive, incoming requests to your upstream services will start to pile up. If they all share the same memory, CPU, or thread pool, a slow dependency can quickly exhaust all available resources, causing your entire application to crash.