Comparison
Graceful degradationvsStatic stability
Graceful degradation
the provider went down and users got a cached answer or an honest error, because you decided that in design rather than at 3am.
A designed answer to 'the model is down or over budget': cached responses, a smaller model, a non-AI code path, or an honest error. Decided in design, not improvised mid-incident.
Full entry →Static stability
the control plane was down for an hour and traffic kept flowing, because nothing in the request path needed to ask it anything.
Designing so a system keeps working from its existing state when its dependencies for making changes are unavailable, rather than needing a successful call to stay healthy. The classic application is capacity: pre-provision for the failed state so a zone failure requires no scaling event, since the scaling API is likely to be struggling at exactly that moment. It costs money in idle capacity and buys you not depending on anything working during the worst hour of the year.
Full entry →