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What Is Bulkhead Isolation?

Bulkhead isolation divides resources such as thread pools or connection pools into separate compartments, one per dependency or class of work. If one compartment is saturated or failing, the others keep functioning because they draw from their own allocation. The name comes from a ship hull divided into watertight sections.

Why it matters

A single slow dependency can otherwise consume every shared thread and stall unrelated requests. Partitioning resources contains the damage so one failure does not sink the whole service.

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