Search the practice set
126 questions, 454 terms and 400 topics in 20 areas.
15 results for “Degradation Modes”
Graceful Degradation
Continuing to deliver reduced but useful function when a dependency fails, instead of failing the whole request.
Brownout
Deliberately reducing the quality or completeness of every response under load, rather than serving some requests fully and rejecting others.
Byzantine Fault
A failure in which a component behaves arbitrarily or deceptively — returning wrong results rather than stopping — as distinct from simply crashing.
Fail-Fast vs Fail-Safe
Whether a component should stop immediately on detecting a problem, or continue in a degraded but safe mode — a choice that depends entirely on which outcome is worse.
Fallback Strategy
What a caller does instead when a circuit breaker is open — the part of the pattern that determines whether failing fast helps anyone.
Grey Failure
A component that is degraded rather than down — slow, intermittently erroring, or failing for a subset of operations — which defeats health checks built for binary states.
Harvest and Yield
A refinement of CAP that treats availability as a continuum — yield is the fraction of requests answered, harvest is the fraction of data reflected in an answer.
Priority Queueing
Classifying requests by business importance so that overload sheds the least valuable work first rather than an arbitrary slice.
One instance in a fleet of fifty is returning correct responses very slowly. Health checks pass and it stays in rotation. How do you detect and handle this?
Why it is not detected Differential observability. The instance believes it is healthy and reports so; its callers experience something else. A health check tha
Your service will exceed capacity by 30% during a known peak. Do you shed load or brown out, and how do you decide what goes first?
The decision Brown out first; shed only if that is not enough. They are complementary rather than alternatives, and brownout is strictly less harmful when it is
Degradation Modes
Deciding in advance what is shed first and what is protected.
Failure Modes
Slow rather than down, partial, grey, and failing while reporting success.
Graceful Degradation
Reduced but useful function when a dependency is gone.
Reliability vs Complexity
Mechanisms that add availability and add failure modes.
Soak Testing
Long runs that surface leaks and slow degradation.