A pipeline retry budget exhausts on a stuck message and the worker drops it silently

A medium Pipeline Design interview practice problem on DataDriven. Write and execute real pipeline design code with instant grading.

Domain

Pipeline Design

Difficulty

medium

Problem

A pipeline retry budget exhausts on a stuck message and the worker drops it silently. The alternatives are worse: crash the worker, or write to stdout. The section's pattern is the dead letter queue: a separate durable destination where messages route after retries exhaust, with an envelope rich enough to recover from (original payload, failure timestamp, exception type, attempt count, correlation ID). Place the DLQ by adding one downstream of the worker and naming the envelope fields the pipeline writes.

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