graceful degradation pattern
When you can't serve everyone perfectly, serve a degraded version rather than failing entirely. Drop optional features (recommendations, related items, personalization) before dropping core ones (login, checkout). Failing soft beats failing hard.
When you can't serve everyone perfectly, serve a degraded version rather than failing entirely. Drop optional features (recommendations, related items, personalization) before dropping core ones (login, checkout). Failing soft beats failing hard.
symptoms
- user-facing latency or error rate climbing under load
- all-or-nothing failure modes
causes
- no soft-fail paths
- critical path coupled to optional features
- no priority tiering on calls
fixes
- classify calls as critical / important / optional
- circuit breakers + fallbacks on optional calls
- feature flags to drop expensive features under load
you might say
- serve a degraded experience
- fall back to the basic version
- drop the nonessential calls