Backpressure Mechanisms in Distributed Systems
Issue #72: System Design Interview Roadmap
Building Production-Grade Resilience from Theory to Practice
What you'll build today:
API Gateway with adaptive circuit breakers and priority-based routing
Backend Service with configurable failure modes and resource monitoring
Intelligent Load Generator implementing Netflix-style retry patterns
Real-time Dashboard visualizing backpressure mechanisms in action
Production-grade patterns from AWS, Google, and Uber implementations
Interactive scenarios to trigger overload, observe recovery, and tune thresholds
When Your System Drowns in Success
Imagine launching a viral product feature that attracts 50x normal traffic overnight. Your load balancers are green, your databases are humming, yet users report timeouts and failed requests. You've just encountered the silent killer of distributed systems: the absence of backpressure mechanisms. Your services are politely accepting every request while quietly suffocating under the load.
This scenario reveals a fundamental truth about distributed systems: managing success often proves harder than handling failure. When traffic spikes overwhelm your system's processing capacity, you need sophisticated mechanisms to gracefully degrade rather than catastrophically collapse.