Dealing with rejection (in distributed systems)

Literature covers distributed system basics like consistency and availability trade-offs, but practical aspects such as observability, multi-tenancy, and operational design require hands-on experience. Backpressure is vital for preventing system overloads in production by rejecting or slowing down requests before reaching catastrophic failure. In WarpStream, effective backpressure was achieved by monitoring in-memory metrics and adjusting workload processing dynamically, preventing system crashes even under high CPU utilization.