3 Resilience Patterns That Keep a Backend Service Up When Its Dependencies Aren't

A slow payment provider — not a crashed one — took down an entire API by holding every connection hostage. The fix comes down to three composable patterns: timeouts to bound individual call duration, retries with backoff and jitter for transient blips, and circuit breakers to stop hammering a dependency that's genuinely down. Stack them in the right order and cascading failures become manageable.