The Reactive Manifesto

Foundational document defining the four properties of reactive systems, published by key practitioners from the distributed systems community.

Key Takeaways

Motivated by modern demands: millisecond response times, 100% uptime, petabyte-scale data, mobile-to-cloud deployment.
Responsive: system responds in a timely manner; foundation of usability and trust; enables quick problem detection.
Resilient: stays responsive in the face of failure; achieved via replication, containment, isolation, and delegation; distinct from simple fault tolerance.
Elastic: stays responsive under varying workload; scales by adding/removing resources; eliminates bottlenecks via sharding and replication.
Message-Driven: relies on asynchronous message-passing; establishes boundaries between components; enables loose coupling, location transparency, and failure delegation; enables backpressure via queue monitoring.
The four properties are interdependent and composable. They apply at all scales.

High — read directly from source.