The Bulkhead Pattern: Designing Systems That Refuse to Drown
Updated December 2025 to reflect modern autonomous and agentic systems Executive Summary Most distributed systems don’t fail catastrophically. They fail quietly. Threads saturate. Queues fill. Latency stretches. Everything is still “up” — and nothing is moving. The Bulkhead pattern exists for one reason: to prevent one part of a system from consuming the oxygen of…