# Resilience Patterns

> Apply proven resilience patterns (retries, circuit breakers, timeouts, bulkheads, fallbacks) so systems degrade gracefully under failure. Use when designing distributed systems, integrating external services, or improving production robustness.

- Skill: `itsual/resilience-patterns` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add itsual/resilience-patterns`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/itsual/resilience-patterns/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- Author: itsual (https://skillmd.com/u/itsual)
- Updated: 2026-09-21
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/itsual/resilience-patterns

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# Resilience Patterns

## Overview

Failure is normal in distributed systems. Design for it deliberately.

## When to Use

- Calling external services or dependencies
- Designing microservices or multi-component systems
- Improving behavior under load or partial outages

## Core Patterns

- **Timeouts** – Always set them; never wait forever
- **Retries** – With backoff and jitter; only for transient errors
- **Circuit breakers** – Prevent cascading failures
- **Bulkheads** – Isolate resources so one failure doesn’t take everything down
- **Fallbacks** – Provide degraded but useful behavior when possible
- **Rate limiting / load shedding** – Protect the system from overload

## Principles

- Make failure modes explicit
- Prefer fast failure over prolonged degradation when appropriate
- Observe and alert on resilience mechanisms (open circuits, retry rates, etc.)
- Test failure scenarios (chaos or fault injection where justified)

## Verification

- Critical external calls have timeouts and sensible retry policies
- Cascading failure risks are identified and mitigated
- Behavior under dependency failure is understood