Resilient pipelines are built around failure modes: retries, idempotency, backpressure, and data contracts that prevent silent corruption.
01. Data contracts
Define schemas, enforce compatibility, and track lineage. Contracts turn breaking changes into visible events instead of invisible bugs.
02. Idempotent processing
Design handlers to safely reprocess events. Exactly-once is rare; at-least-once is normal—embrace it with the right patterns.
03. Backpressure and scaling
Use queues, batching, and concurrency limits to stay stable under bursty load. Stability beats peak throughput.