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NFJS2026

The Operating Limits of Microservices

Reliable systems are not accidents. They are designed with explicit operating limits. This session translates lessons from high-risk domains into practical engineering guardrails for microservices: latency budgets, timeout strategy, retry discipline, concurrency limits, and blast-radius controls.

In high-consequence systems, teams define and respect operating limits. Software teams should do the same.

This session introduces an operating-limits model for modern microservices and platform environments. We’ll map common failure patterns (retry storms, cascading timeouts, queue overload, dependency fan-out) to concrete design and operational constraints that prevent small issues from becoming full incidents.

You’ll learn practical techniques for timeout layering, bulkheads, error budgets, load shedding, progressive degradation, and observability signals that reveal approaching limits before customers feel impact.

We’ll also cover leadership practices: how to align teams around reliability contracts and how to enforce guardrails without turning architecture into bureaucracy.

Outcomes:

  • Define service-level operating envelopes
  • Reduce cascading failures in distributed systems
  • Improve incident prevention with better guardrails
  • Balance delivery speed with reliability discipline

Yes, we will talk about when your retries are lying to you. And no, adding one more queue is not always the answer.


Ken Sipe

About Ken Sipe

Ken is a distributed application engineer. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on containers, container orchestration, high scale micro-service design and continuous delivery systems.

Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS), and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.

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