Designing Reliable Distributed Systems: Failures, Retries & Idempotency

Modern backend systems operate in unreliable environments: networks drop packets, services time out, messages duplicate, and partial failures become the norm. Reliability isn’t a feature - it must be intentionally designed.

In this session, Violetta Pidvolotska breaks down the essential building blocks of resilient distributed systems: timeouts, retries, exponential backoff, idempotency, consistency guarantees, and failure-aware architecture design. She shows how to reason about real-world failure modes, how to identify reliability risks before they appear in production, and how to design systems that degrade gracefully instead of catastrophically.

The talk focuses on clear mental models and practical design patterns rather than tools or vendor-specific solutions. Attendees will leave with a solid foundation for designing more robust backend systems - and a deeper understanding of how architecture decisions impact reliability at scale.