Bulkhead Pattern

Kind: pattern

Layer: Correctness Core

Record: architecture:bulkhead-pattern

Severity: contextual

Scope: resource pool, service, runtime

Canonical: Ontology

A design pattern that gives each workload its own pool of threads or connections, so one workload cannot exhaust the others.

Listed in Architecture principles, after Circuit Breaker Pattern and before Backpressure.

Requires

• Resource Isolation

Reinforces

• Fault Isolation

Enables

• Blast-Radius Reduction

Conflicts with

• Shared Resource Pool

In tension with

• Resource Utilization

Tensions

• Bulkhead Pattern / Resource Utilization

Violated by

• Shared Resource Pool

Severity

• contextual

Category

• Error Handling / Resilience

Refactors

• Synchronous Chain Trap
• Resilience
• Error Boundaries

Linked from

• Anti-patterns
• Error Handling / Resilience
• Scalability / Performance / Optimization
• Error Handling / Resilience
• Quality Attributes
• Severity levels
• The resolutions