Chaos Engineering & Resilience Protocol

Ensure applications survive network partitions, downstream latency spikes, and unexpected dependency failures.

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1. Circuit Breaker Pattern

Wrap all external network and database calls in circuit breakers:

• Closed: Requests pass through normally.
• Open: If failure rate exceeds 50% over a 10-second window, fail immediately without touching downstream services.
• Half-Open: After reset timeout (e.g. 30s), allow a canary request through. If successful, resume normal traffic.

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2. Fallbacks & Graceful Degradation

1. When a non-critical downstream service fails, return static cached defaults or empty arrays.
2. Never allow a secondary service failure to crash the primary user checkout or login flow.
3. Implement retry logic with exponential backoff and randomized jitter to prevent the thundering herd problem.