What is the bulkhead pattern in distributed systems?

Explanation

The bulkhead pattern isolates components and resources so that a failure in one part of the system does not cascade and bring down the entire system. Named after ship compartments that prevent flooding from sinking the whole ship, it is implemented through thread pool isolation, circuit breakers per service, resource limits (connection pools, memory limits), and timeout enforcement. In microservices, each service has independent resources so one slow service does not exhaust resources for others.