Topic
Propagation & containment
How a single bad step spreads through a pipeline, and what actually contains the propagation radius.
Research
- Analysis
Do microservices resilience patterns port to AI agents?
Five proven microservices resilience patterns, from circuit breaker to timeout budget, mapped to their AI agent equivalents, with a judgment on how far each analogy actually holds.
- Analysis
Cascading failures in agent systems, from trigger to containment
OWASP's ASI08 files cascading failures under security. Reframed as error-propagation engineering, one fault becomes two measurable quantities, propagation radius and containment rate, per topology.
Guides
Terms
-
Backpressure (agent pipelines)
Backpressure is the signal a saturated stage in an agent pipeline sends back to whatever feeds it, asking the producer to lower its rate so the queue between the two stays bounded and the pipeline refuses work at its entrance rather than losing it mid-run.
-
Bulkhead isolation (agent systems)
Bulkhead isolation is the practice of partitioning the resources an agent system shares, including worker slots, provider rate budgets, tool credentials and state, so that one agent's failure exhausts only its own partition while the rest of the system keeps running.
-
Cascade resistance
Cascade resistance is a topology-level resilience score for how well an architecture keeps one fault from becoming a system failure, ranking chain, supervisor, orchestrator-worker, and debate designs on one axis.
-
Circuit breaker (AI agents)
A circuit breaker in an AI agent system is a control that stops the orchestrator from calling a tool or sub-agent once that dependency's failures cross a stated threshold, holds the calls off through a cooldown, then admits a few probe calls before resuming.
-
Containment rate
Containment rate is the fraction of an injected fault a system stops before it crosses the first hop, reported with a confidence interval rather than as a bare point estimate.
-
Error propagation (multi-agent)
Error propagation is the process by which one agent's error becomes trusted input for the agents downstream of it, compounding hop by hop along a chain or fanning out across a topology, so a single local mistake corrupts work far from where it began.
-
Exponential backoff with jitter
Exponential backoff with jitter is the retry-timing discipline in which each attempt waits longer than the last and the wait is drawn at random from that growing interval, so a population of clients that failed together does not stay synchronized and collide again on a longer cycle.
-
Failure attribution (agents)
Failure attribution is the diagnostic that traces an observed multi-agent cascade back to the agent and step whose output first went wrong (the root cause), by reconstructing the run as a cascade tree and isolating its earliest corrupted node.
-
Failure domain (agent topology)
A failure domain is the set of agents, tools and steps that a single fault can reach in a given topology, drawn from the wiring and the shared state rather than measured from a run, so it bounds the propagation radius any one fault can have.
-
Graceful degradation (AI agents)
Graceful degradation in an agent system is the behavior of returning a reduced but still correct result when a component the run depended on fails, giving up scope, freshness or confidence instead of the whole request, and declaring in the response what was given up.
-
Propagation depth
Propagation depth is the number of successive hops a fault travels through an agent system before a check contains it, the depth counterpart to the breadth of reach that propagation radius reads.
-
Propagation radius (agent systems)
Propagation radius, the fault-spread measure sometimes informally called a system's 'blast radius', is the count or fraction of downstream agents and steps a single fault reaches before containment, measured across a defined topology such as an orchestrator with N workers or a chain of depth D.
-
Retry storm (agent systems)
Retry storm is the failure mode where correlated retries across the layers of an agent stack multiply into far more load than the original traffic, holding a downstream saturated long after the transient fault that triggered the first retry has cleared.
-
Timeout budget (agent runs)
A timeout budget is a single wall-clock deadline held at the top of an agent run, from which every layer below derives its own timeout by subtracting what has already been spent, so the run is bounded rather than each call being bounded independently.