Designing Resilient Plugins: What Should Happen When One Fails?

In an e-commerce app, plugins may handle payments, fraud checks, order validation and customer notifications. If one plugin crashes, should it bring down the entire application? The answer depends on the plugin’s role. A failed notification after a successful payment should usually be isolated and retried later. It should not automatically reverse the customer’s payment. However, a payment or fraud-check failure may need to stop an order from proceeding. A reliable plugin architecture needs clear contracts, execution order, timeouts, concurrency rules and error handling. An interface defines how plugins communicate, but it does not by itself prevent delays or crashes from affecting the wider system. For critical services, would you keep plugins inside the main application or run them in separate processes? What reliability and performance trade-offs would you consider?

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