Building Resilient Distributed Systems

Chapter 2. Timeouts

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In Chapter 1, I introduced the two golden rules of computing, namely:

1. You cannot beam information instantaneously between two points

2. Sometimes you can’t reach the thing you want to talk to

In this chapter, I’m going to address these points head on, looking at things primarily from the viewpoint of clients talking to remote services. Specifically, I’m going to look at what happens when a server takes too long to respond, and how timeouts can help. Along the way I’ll be sharing a real-world example of a system outage that I was involved with, and the role that timeouts played.

A Brief Note

This chapter will focus on scenarios where one computer is calling another. The scenarios outlined here will typically be outlined in terms of the types of communication that are common in a microservice architecture, but fundamentally these principles apply to any inter-process communication.

Throughout, I will make heavy ...