Day 36: Dead Letter Queues - Your Safety Net for Failed Log Processing
📧 From the "254-Day Hands-On System Design with Distributed Log Processing" Series
The Problem That Keeps Engineers Awake
Picture this: Your log processing system is humming along, handling thousands of log entries per second. Suddenly, a malformed JSON log from a legacy service crashes your parser. Without proper handling, that single bad message could block your entire processing pipeline, creating a cascading failure that brings down your monitoring system.
This is where dead letter queues (DLQs) become your system's insurance policy.
[📊 DLQ System Architecture Diagram]