How to Keep Services Running During Failures?

Graceful degradation is a design principle that allows systems to maintain essential functionality during failures by operating at reduced capacity rather than crashing completely. Key strategies include rate limiting to control traffic, request coalescing to reduce duplicate queries, load shedding to prioritize critical requests, retry mechanisms with jitter to prevent thundering herd problems, circuit breakers to isolate failing services, request timeouts to prevent resource exhaustion, and comprehensive monitoring with alerting for proactive issue detection.