Bulkhead Pattern

Isolate resources so one failing area does not take down the whole system.

isolation

Detailed Description

Bulkheads come from ship design: compartments stop one breach from sinking the entire ship.

In software, isolate pools, queues, workers, or deployments so noncritical load cannot starve critical work.

Pool A: checkout
Pool B: search
Pool C: reports
Report failure cannot sink checkout

Pros

Failure isolation, protects critical paths

Cons

Capacity planning across pools

Examples: Thread pools, connection pools, K8s namespaces