Rate-Based Load Shedding and Backpressure
Learn how to keep a system alive under overload by shedding low-priority load and applying backpressure, so the service degrades gracefully instead of collapsing.
Overload Kills Systems
Circuit breakers and retries protect against dependency failures. But what protects a service from too much traffic of its own? Without limits, an overloaded service slows, queues grow, and it eventually falls over for everyone.
Graceful Degradation
The goal under overload is graceful degradation: serve as many requests as you can well, and reject the rest fast, rather than serving everyone slowly until total failure.
All lessons in this course
- Circuit Breakers and Bulkheads
- Idempotency and Retry Mechanisms
- Geo-Distributed APIs & Disaster Recovery
- Rate-Based Load Shedding and Backpressure