--- title: Distributed Systems - What Can Go Wrong and How to Get... description: A conference talk covering four key patterns for building reliable distributed systems. The speaker explains why naive retries cause 'spiral of death' under... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/distributed-systems---what-can-go-wrong-and-how-to-get-it-right-by-florian-mair-ksb92hxfz twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Distributed Systems - What Can Go Wrong and How to Get It Right by Florian Mair | daily.dev og:description: A conference talk covering four key patterns for building reliable distributed systems. The speaker explains why naive retries cause 'spiral of death' under... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/distributed-systems---what-can-go-wrong-and-how-to-get-it-right-by-florian-mair-ksb92hxfz og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/ksb92HxFz.png og:image:alt: Distributed Systems - What Can Go Wrong and How to Get It Right by Florian Mair og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Distributed Systems - What Can Go Wrong and How to Get It Right by Florian Mair **[Devoxx](https://daily.dev/sources/devoxx)** · 33 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A conference talk covering four key patterns for building reliable distributed systems. The speaker explains why naive retries cause 'spiral of death' under load and how token bucket mechanisms limit retry-induced overload to ~1% additional traffic. The fallback pattern is examined critically, with real examples like the OpenAI/ChatGPT outage caused by cache failure cascading to database overload. Load shedding is presented as a way to prioritize high-value traffic by dropping low-priority requests (bots, free-tier users) before timeouts waste server resources. Finally, the constant work pattern is introduced as a way to maintain predictable, deterministic load on downstream systems regardless of external event volume, illustrated with AWS EC2 provisioning and DNS update examples. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The ‘Super Bowl’ standard: Architecting distributed systems for massive concurrency](https://daily.dev/posts/the-super-bowl-standard-architecting-distributed-systems-for-massive-concurrency-mvxs8yfr2) · InfoWorld · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [3 Resilience Patterns That Keep a Backend Service Up When Its Dependencies Aren't](https://daily.dev/posts/3-resilience-patterns-that-keep-a-backend-service-up-when-its-dependencies-aren-t-by1axueza) · The T-Shaped Dev · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Navigating the Distributed Systems: My Takeaways from MIT 6.824](https://daily.dev/posts/navigating-the-distributed-systems-my-takeaways-from-mit-6-824-vl2kd2mpf) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#distributed-systems](https://daily.dev/tags/distributed-systems) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/distributed-systems---what-can-go-wrong-and-how-to-get-it-right-by-florian-mair-ksb92hxfz) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Distributed Systems - What Can Go Wrong and How to Get It Right by Florian Mair","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/distributed-systems---what-can-go-wrong-and-how-to-get-it-right-by-florian-mair-ksb92hxfz","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/distributed-systems---what-can-go-wrong-and-how-to-get-it-right-by-florian-mair-ksb92hxfz"},"datePublished":"2026-03-16T08:13:41.240Z","dateModified":"2026-03-16T08:21:10.764Z","description":"A conference talk covering four key patterns for building reliable distributed systems. 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