Platform & DevOps·Running it: capacity, failure and recovery
the instance was fast for twenty minutes and then abruptly slow, because it had been spending credits it had run out of.
Burst capacity
Also calledburstable capacity, credit-based performance
Capacity available above a baseline for limited periods, either as a cloud instance's credit mechanism or as an autoscaler's fast-path. It is genuinely economical for spiky, low-average workloads and actively dangerous for anything sustained, because performance falls off a cliff rather than degrading. The signature symptom is a service that is fine in testing and slow after an hour in production.