Presentation: Graceful Degradation as a Feature

The move from monolith to microservice has allowed pieces of functionality to be deployed individually and on demand. Having functionality isolated allows the opportunity for one microservice to fail without bringing down the whole system.

However, it also increases complexity with the number of API calls being made across all of these services. Each service has unique failure models, whether its a database, cache, queue, etc. How can you be sure that one single failure doesn’t cause an outage for your end users?

Landing the launches of new products and features and providing your users with a positive experience is crucial to your success. If something is to fail, you’d prefer they didn’t know. Or if they did, it shouldn’t interrupt their experience.

In this talk, we’ll cover graceful degradation as an engineering goal which can be confidently tested with Chaos Engineering. By purposely causing failure of one service at a time in a controlled environment, you can safely observe the effect on the end user, whether that’s on a laptop browser, a mobile app, or the result of an API call.