Graceful Degradation

Reduced but useful function when a dependency is gone.

6Questions

13Flashcards

4Terms

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Questions

6 to work through

intermediate Multiple choice

A recommendation service is unavailable during a high-traffic period. Should the application show popular items, cached recommendations, results from an older model, or nothing at all?

2 min answer
intermediate

A streaming service's homepage assembles rows from a dozen personalisation services. One returns 4-second latency instead of 40 ms. What happens, and what should have been designed?

2 min answer
intermediate

The recommendation service is down. Walk through every level of degraded response and say who decides which one is used.

2 min answer
intermediate

What distinguishes a real graceful-degradation capability from an aspiration, and how do you design and validate a degradation ladder?

3 min answer
intermediate

What happens to your marketplace if the payment provider is unavailable for two hours during peak?

2 min answer
advanced

A payments platform's fraud service is degraded during a peak commerce event. Should the payment path wait, skip the check, use cached risk scores, fall back to simpler rules, or fail? What should determine the answer?

2 min answer

Terminology

4 terms in this topic

practice

Fallback Independence

The requirement that a degraded path fail independently of the primary - and be exercised continuously, because fallbacks that are never run do not work.

practice

Feature Criticality Tiering

Classifying product functionality by whether it must work, should work, or can be dropped, so degradation decisions are made in advance by the business.

pattern

Graceful Degradation in Practice

Deliberately reducing functionality to preserve the core when a dependency fails — a product decision expressed in architecture.

pattern

Value-Graduated Fallback

A degradation ladder whose depth depends on the value at stake, so a low-value transaction proceeds on weak signals while a high-value one fails clos…

Reliability & Resilience