Five things every developer should know about building mission-critical systems
summary
Five concrete practices for reliable payments: use retries with a unique idempotency key to avoid double-booking, add a circuit breaker to stop endless waits, and decouple with outbox/inbox for guaranteed delivery and surge buffering. Add end-to-end tracing and metrics via OpenTelemetry (one demo trace shows 60 spans) so silent crashes are visible. Scale background workers with leader election and partitioning, and validate with local resilience and load tests using Aspire and K6 (one SOAP bug appears at ~100 concurrent requests).
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Mission-critical systems intro
- 2:43Handling server errors
- 6:10Idempotent services
- 8:21Circuit breakers for delays
- 12:39Outbox pattern decoupling
- 16:54Observability with tracing
- 21:09Leader election scaling
- 24:49Inbox pattern buffering
- 27:41Idempotency demo
- 31:15Outbox and inbox messaging
- 34:05Resilience testing automation
- 38:45Local load testing
- 44:23AI load testing
- 51:53Dev containers standard
- 54:24Five key lessons
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