jargon

Backend & systems·Resilience and failure handling

you pass the remaining time budget down with the request so a service four hops deep knows there is no point starting.

Deadline propagation

Carrying an absolute deadline through a call chain so every hop knows how long the overall request has left. It stops work that can no longer be delivered, which is what turns a latency spike into wasted capacity otherwise. Without it, each layer's independent timeout multiplies and the total can exceed what the client is willing to wait many times over.

Commonly confused with