Tag Failure Amplification

When a Third-Party API Became Our Bottleneck

The application was healthy. CPU was normal. Memory was stable. The database was performing well. Internal services were responding within their expected latency. And yet one part of the system was getting slower. Payment requests. At first, we looked at…

When Retries Made the Problem Worse

A downstream service started timing out. So we did what seemed like the responsible thing. We added retries. The thinking was straightforward. If a request fails because of a temporary network problem or a momentary downstream slowdown, try again. The…