17 - The Throttling, Retry and Circuit Breaker Patterns
How do you protect your infrastructure from traffic spikes, safeguard multi-tenant workloads from noisy neighbours, and handle transient failures gracefully? Chris and John Downs walk through three essential cloud resilience patterns that every developer building on Azure should understand. Part of the “Architecting for the Cloud, One Pattern at a Time” series.
The Throttling Pattern
Protect your services and downstream dependencies from high or unexpected load. Rather than a simple binary on/off gate, throttling can degrade gracefully — disabling non-critical features under load, shaping traffic, or signalling clients via HTTP 429 with a Retry-After header. Azure services like Cosmos DB and Service Bus use this approach natively.
The Retry Pattern Handle transient faults — temporary failures that resolve on their own — without crashing your application. Learn why naive immediate retries can worsen problems, and how exponential backoff with jitter (as implemented in libraries like Polly for .NET) helps spread retry load.
The Circuit Breaker Pattern Prevent cascade failures by short-circuiting calls to a failing downstream service. The three states — closed (normal), open (blocking calls), and half-open (probing for recovery) — give your dependencies time to recover while protecting your own service from compounding failures.
Telemetry is key — all three patterns generate valuable signals. Logging retry attempts, throttle events, and circuit state transitions lets you spot seasonality, capacity gaps, and systemic issues before they become outages.
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