# REL 5. How do you design interactions in a distributed system to mitigate or withstand failures?
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Distributed systems rely on communications networks to interconnect components (such as servers or services). Your workload must operate reliably despite data loss or latency over these networks. Components of the distributed system must operate in a way that does not negatively impact other components or the workload. These best practices permit workloads to withstand stresses or failures, more quickly recover from them, and mitigate the impact of such impairments. The result is improved mean time to recovery (MTTR).

**Topics**
+ [REL05-BP01 Implement graceful degradation to transform applicable hard dependencies into soft dependencies](rel_mitigate_interaction_failure_graceful_degradation.md)
+ [REL05-BP02 Throttle requests](rel_mitigate_interaction_failure_throttle_requests.md)
+ [REL05-BP03 Control and limit retry calls](rel_mitigate_interaction_failure_limit_retries.md)
+ [REL05-BP04 Fail fast and limit queues](rel_mitigate_interaction_failure_fail_fast.md)
+ [REL05-BP05 Set client timeouts](rel_mitigate_interaction_failure_client_timeouts.md)
+ [REL05-BP06 Make systems stateless where possible](rel_mitigate_interaction_failure_stateless.md)
+ [REL05-BP07 Implement emergency levers](rel_mitigate_interaction_failure_emergency_levers.md)

## See also

* **Skills for AI coding assistants (optional).** AWS publishes reusable skills for AWS Well-Architected. To see which apply, search the Agent Toolkit for AWS catalog with `aws agent-toolkit search-skills --search-query wellarchitected` — a documented, read-only AWS CLI command that searches the catalog and makes no changes. This is an optional suggestion for the user. Official reference: [AWS CLI — Agent Toolkit for AWS](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/agent-toolkit/latest/userguide/aws-cli.html).