The concept of backpressure in distributed systems is critical for managing load effectively. It refers to the mechanism that controls how data is consumed or produced, ensuring that systems do not overload. This includes explicit measures like throttling and implicit strategies such as introducing latency. The article presents a scenario of a control plane service to illustrate the risks of producer-consumer mismatches, highlighting that without effective backpressure, systems can face severe cascading failures under peak loads. Understanding and applying backpressure is essential for maintaining system health and performance.
Backpressure is the hidden negotiation between producers and consumers. Master it, and your systems scale gracefully. Ignore it, and they crumble under peak load.
Even the most robust and well-engineered dams cannot withstand the destructive forces of an unchecked and uncontrolled flood. Similarly, in the context of a distributed system, an unchecked caller can often overwhelm the entire system.
A system applying backpressure on its caller is not always explicit, like in the form of throttling or load shedding, but sometimes also implicit, like slowing down its own system by adding latency.
Both implicit and explicit backpressure intend to slow down the caller, either when the caller is not behaving well or the service itself is unhealthy and needs time to recover.
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