Bulkhead Pattern
A resilience pattern that partitions resources or concurrency so failure or saturation in one workload does not consume the capacity required by others.
Resilience Context
The bulkhead pattern partitions concurrency or resources so saturation in one workload cannot consume the capacity required by another. Separate thread pools, connection pools, queues, or semaphore budgets can isolate tenants, endpoints, or dependencies.
Capacity Boundary
Partitions that are too small waste idle capacity, while a completely shared pool enlarges failure blast radius. Sizing should reflect real traffic, failure behavior, and recovery policy rather than an arbitrary equal split.
Related Resilience Concepts
- Circuit Breaker
- Load Shedding
- Thread Pool
- Resource Isolation