The Great Connection Pool Meltdown

Tuist's caching server experienced cascading failures when their cloud provider's network issues caused connection pool exhaustion. Thousands of failed S3 requests queued up, consuming memory until the server crashed repeatedly. The team implemented fail-fast queue configurations and migrated to a new provider (Render.com), resolving the stability issues. Key lessons include the importance of monitoring, trusting initial diagnoses, and designing systems that gracefully handle failures rather than cascading them.