Preserve the essential user outcome#
If recommendations fail, keep product, price, cart, and checkout. If feed ranking fails, return a chronological feed. If comments fail, keep video playback. Classify critical and optional dependencies before the incident.
| Technique | Cost |
|---|---|
| Cached or stale result | Freshness decreases |
| Simplified response | Quality/features decrease |
| Read-only mode | Writes are delayed or rejected |
Fallback paths require capacity, correctness, and failure testing. They can conceal a long-running outage if their use is not observable.
Related practice problems
Use the manifest-backed prompts below to apply this lesson in a complete design.
- Addressing cascading failuresGoogle SRE
- Reliability design patternsMicrosoft Azure Architecture Center
Reach this point to mark the lesson as read.