1 min lesson
Graceful degradation and circuit breakers
For each case in "Graceful degradation and circuit breakers", name the signal and the response you would use.
Step 1 of 2
Graceful degradation and circuit breakersa partial outage shouldn't be a total one
When a dependency or a region fails, the goal is to lose a feature, not the product. Circuit breakers stop you from hammering a sick dependency and dragging healthy paths down with it.
Trip after a failure threshold so calls fail fast instead of piling up.
Half-open probes test recovery before fully reopening.
Pair with timeouts and bounded retries (with jitter) so retries don't become a self-inflicted DDoS.
If retrieval is down, answer with reduced context rather than erroring out.
If a region is down, steer to the next-nearest and accept slightly higher latency.
Shed non-essential work first so the core path keeps its budget.