All terms
Glossary
Graceful degradation
A system loses individual features under partial failure instead of going down entirely.
If recommendations fail, ordering should still work. If search struggles, the category page should still render. That does not happen by itself, it comes from deciding which part is core and which is not.
Technically it consists of few building blocks: short timeouts, fallback values, and the willingness to serve an answer without the nice extra.
How you notice it
- A partial failure currently takes down the whole page.
- There are extras such as recommendations or reviews.
- External services are part of the flow.
Frequently asked
How do I decide what is core and what is extra?
By asking what earns the money. Everything needed for ordering, payment and delivery is core. Everything else may be missing in an emergency. That list belongs in place before the next outage, not in the middle of it.