release-it

Apply circuit breakers on every integration point so a failing dependency stops propagating errors to callers. Combine with bulkheads that isolate thread and connection pools per dependency, plus timeouts on all outbound calls to reclaim stuck resources.

A circuit breaker stops calls to a failing dependency after a threshold, giving it time to recover, while retry with exponential backoff and jitter reattempts transient failures. Use retries for brief glitches and circuit breakers to prevent retry storms from amplifying outages.

Decouple deployment from release using blue-green, rolling, or canary deployment strategies with health check gates. Use feature flags to dark-launch code, and make database migrations backward-compatible so old and new code run simultaneously.

Use the RED method for services (rate, errors, duration) and the USE method for resources (utilization, saturation, errors). Alert on user-facing symptoms like SLO burn rate rather than raw causes like CPU usage.

Chaos experiments in production require explicit authorization, dedicated tooling like Gremlin or Litmus, monitoring, and immediate rollback capability. Start in non-production environments with small blast radius, define a steady-state hypothesis first, and escalate gradually.

Blocked threads from slow dependencies exhaust shared pools silently, freezing the entire system without errors. Fix this by isolating pools per dependency with the bulkhead pattern and enforcing connect and read timeouts on every external call.