Graceful degradation preserves the important part
Deciding in advance which part of the service must survive is the whole of the work.
Under pressure, everything looks essential and the decision gets made by whoever is loudest. Agreed beforehand, degradation is a plan; agreed during, it is triage. The useful question is which single function, if it kept working, would make the outage tolerable to the people who depend on you.
More on Resilience
- High availability and disaster recovery solve different problemsA part, or the place
- A dependency can be more critical than the applicationThe lighter side goes down
- Manual workarounds have capacity limitsThe pipe gets narrower
- Recovery priorities should follow business outcomesWhose order is it?
- Resilience includes people and suppliersThe shelf runs out
- Failover can fail if never exercisedThe day it is asked