Designing Resilient Systems Beyond Retries (Part 1): Rate-Limiting

This post introduces rate-limiting as a strategy for system resiliency, positioning it as a technique that goes beyond retries and circuit breakers. It details the challenges associated with retries (retry storms) and circuit breakers (client configuration dependency). The post then explores various rate-limiting strategies, including per-client, per-endpoint, and multi-level thresholds, and discusses the distinction between local and global rate-limiting. It emphasizes the importance of server-side rate-limiting and the need for a rate-limiting service that avoids becoming a single point of failure, mentioning Grab's Quotas service as an example.