Understanding the bulkhead design pattern

Bulkheads on ships help isolate areas of the ship so that damage such as flooding, fire, or explosion impacts only one section of the ship and is not spread to other sections. Bulkheads also establish the stability of the overall ship. The bulkhead design pattern is based on the ship example. Instead of a ship, we are protecting the system.

Most non-trivial systems will involve multiple components. When those components are implemented in a manner that they are interdependent, systems can fail. As an example, review the system design illustrated next. As you can see, there are several points of failure. If the Server fails, nothing is accessible. Also, if one of the three modules fails, the connected database is inaccessible. These scenarios would make the entire system unusable:

System without the bulkhead design pattern

Now let&apos...