System Design Roadmap 6 - Reliability and Security Patterns

Roadmap.sh system design study block: reliability and security patterns.

Reliability Pattern

A repeatable design technique that helps systems survive faults, overload, or dependency failures.

Deployment Stamps

Deploy independent copies of an application stack so failures and scaling are isolated by stamp.

Geodes

Deploy services across geographic regions so users can be served near their location with regional resilience.

Health Endpoint Monitoring

Expose health-check endpoints so infrastructure can detect unhealthy instances.

Throttling

Limit request rates or concurrency to protect services from overload.

Bulkhead

Isolate resources so failure in one area does not consume capacity needed by others.

Circuit Breaker

Stop calling a failing dependency temporarily to prevent cascading failures and allow recovery.

Compensating Transaction

Undo or offset previous steps when a distributed workflow cannot use a single atomic transaction.

Retry

Reattempt transient failures, ideally with timeouts, jitter, and exponential backoff.

High Availability

Designing systems to continue serving despite individual component failures.

Resiliency

The ability to absorb faults, recover, and continue operating within acceptable bounds.

Security Pattern

A reusable design approach for protecting identity, access, secrets, and attack surfaces.

Federated Identity

Let users authenticate through a trusted identity provider instead of each app managing credentials separately.

Gatekeeper

Validate, authorize, or sanitize requests at a boundary before they reach sensitive services.

Valet Key Security

Use limited-scope, time-bound tokens so clients access only the resource and operation they need.

Timeout

A limit on how long a service waits for a dependency before failing fast.

Rate Limiting

Controlling how many requests a client can make in a time window.

Graceful Degradation

Keeping core functionality available while disabling or simplifying noncritical features during stress.

Fault Isolation

Separating components, tenants, or regions so failures do not spread widely.

Idempotency Key

A unique client-supplied token that lets servers safely deduplicate retried operations.