Integrations
Most commerce incidents are integration incidents
Stock that is wrong by four units. A price that updated everywhere except one market. An order that reached the warehouse twice. None of these are storefront bugs. They are integration bugs, and they are the ones that cost real money.
- Every connection goes through the same event bus, with the same retry, dead letter and alerting behaviour
- Workers are idempotent, so a duplicate message is a no operation rather than a duplicate shipment
- Every sync produces a reconciliation report, so a silent drift is caught the next morning, not the next quarter
- Contract tests against the ERP schema, so an ERP upgrade breaks the pipeline instead of production
- An integration register that lists every flow, its owner, its cadence and what happens when it fails
Topology
One layer, one set of rules
Integration topology with objects, direction and cadence
Figure 08 / integration registerFigure 08. Cadences shown are typical. They are set per client from the business tolerance for staleness, not from what the source system happens to support.
Failure behaviour
What happens when a system stops answering
| Failure | Shopper sees | System does | Team gets |
|---|---|---|---|
| ERP unreachable | Nothing. Prices served from the last known good snapshot. | Circuit opens, sync queued, snapshot age monitored | Warning at 30 minutes, page at 2 hours |
| Stock feed stale | Availability shown with a safety buffer applied | Buffer widens automatically as the feed ages | Warning at 5 minutes, page at 20 minutes |
| Payment provider degraded | An alternative method, or the same method on the secondary provider | Routing switches after 3 consecutive failures | Immediate page |
| Order to ERP failing | Nothing. The order is accepted and confirmed. | Retries with backoff, then dead letter queue | Alert on first dead letter, daily reconciliation report |
| Search unavailable | Category browse and a database backed search fallback | Fallback provider engaged automatically | Warning immediately, page at 15 minutes |
Table 06. This is agreed with your operations team in discovery and rehearsed during hardening, so nobody is discovering the behaviour for the first time during an incident.
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