# The Synchrony Budget

DevFeed: [The Synchrony Budget](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-synchrony-budget-18879.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.morling.dev/blog/the-synchrony-budget/>)

Published: 2025-03-18T13:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Gunnar Morling](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/gunnar-morling.md>)

Topics: [Network](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/network.md>), [Availability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/availability.md>), [Kafka](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/kafka.md>)

Tags: [asynchronous](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/asynchronous.md>), [availability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/availability.md>), [distributed](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/distributed.md>), [e-commerce](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/e-commerce.md>), [kafka](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kafka.md>), [network](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/network.md>), [services](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/services.md>)

## AI overview

The article introduces the "synchrony budget," a design principle for distributed services: minimize synchronous calls to reduce request latency and dependencies that can lower service availability. It uses an e-commerce order flow to argue that shipment notifications can be handled asynchronously, such as through a Kafka topic, when an immediate response is unnecessary.

## Source excerpt

For building a system of distributed services, one concept I think is very valuable to keep in mind is what I call the synchrony budget: as much as possible, a service should minimize the number of synchronous requests which it makes to other services.