Bulkheads

Bulkheads Isolate Resource Pools Before Failures Spread

A service can remain healthy at the process level while becoming useless because one workload has consumed every scarce execution resource. A slow dependency can occupy all outbound connections. A noisy tenant can fill every worker slot. A background job can take the same semaphore permits needed by interactive requests. Bulkhead isolation limits that coupling. Instead of letting unrelated work compete for one undifferentiated pool, the system partitions selected resources and gives each class of work a bounded share. Saturation then has a smaller blast radius.