GEARS / IN PRACTICE
The hard part of an integration is rarely the request itself. It is ownership, failure handling, mapping, rate limits, retries, observability and what happens when one system changes.
Start with the contract
Define source of truth, data ownership, IDs, update direction and failure behaviour before wiring endpoints together.
Design for failure
Timeouts, retries, queues, idempotency and reconciliation matter whenever the integration affects money or operations.
Protect the experience
External latency and outages should not automatically become customer-facing outages.
GEARS approach
Keep boundaries explicit, log meaningful events and build recovery paths for the situations operators will actually face.
