Error handling is very important when making HTTP requests from your backend to third party services or to other microservices. Running into long connection timeouts can easily fill up the available PHP processes on your server. This can bring your application down even if the other service is only used to fetch optional data in a part of your application. Also you need to take care not to flood the service with a lot of requests if it’s recovering from an outage. We will introduce techniques like circuit breaking and back pressure which make the HTTP requests more resilient against those kinds of problems. And we will show you how to use the Envoy HTTP proxy to solve many of those problems without changes to your code.