.NET Architecture & System Design Interview Question #131
What is the Bulkhead pattern?
Resilience, Rate Limiting, Health Checks & Observability Senior Advanced
Quick Interview Answer
The Bulkhead pattern isolates resources so failure or overload in one workload does not consume all capacity needed by others. The name comes from compartments in a ship that limit the spread of flooding.
Detailed Explanation
The Bulkhead pattern isolates resources so failure or overload in one workload does not consume all capacity needed by others. The name comes from compartments in a ship that limit the spread of flooding.
In software, bulkheads can use separate connection pools, concurrency limits, worker pools, queues, or service instances for different workloads.
Code Example
Critical traffic -> Pool A (20 slots)
Reports -> Pool B (5 slots)
Report overload cannot consume
all critical-request capacity.