What is Bulkhead Pattern used by Hystrix?

Question

Hystrix, a Netflix API for latency and fault tolerance in complex distributed systems uses Bulkhead Pattern technique for thread isolation. Can someone please elaborate on it.

Answer 1

Here is a good example with runtime explanation for bulkhead in Resilience4j which is inspired by Netflix Hystrix.

Below example configurations might give some clarity of usage.

Example configurations: Allow maximum 5 concurrent calls at any given time. Keep other calls waiting for until one of the in-process 5 concurrent finishes or until maximum of 2 seconds.

Idea is not to burden any system with load more than they can consume. If incoming load is greater than consumption, then wait for reasonable time or just timeout & go for alternate path.