2 min lesson
Throughput, queues & backpressure
Take this case and make the call: "One customer's webhook endpoint goes slow and starts timing out. With a single shared delivery queue, why does this become everyone's problem - and what design prevents it?"
Step 1 of 2
Agent workflows are spiky. A cohort of developers kicks off background agents within the same few minutes of a workday and the event rate jumps an order of magnitude, then falls. The system has to absorb that without dropping events or starving the rest of Core Services.
The first move is to decouple. A queue between producers and consumers turns a spike into a backlog the consumers drain at their own pace, instead of a flood that overruns them. The receiver acks fast, enqueues and returns; workers pull and process. The queue is the shock absorber.
Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.
Each layer absorbs a different kind of failure so the one below it stays calm.