Engineer for graceful degradation

Design systems that bend without breaking by anticipating failure modes and practicing responses before incidents occur.

Failure mode catalog

Identify the top failure scenarios across infrastructure, dependencies, and code paths. Document symptoms, detection signals, and mitigation strategies.

Failure mode catalog outlining causes, detection signals, mitigations, and owners
Use during resilience reviews to prioritize high-impact mitigations.

Resilience patterns

Stability techniques

  • Bulkheads to isolate noisy neighbors.
  • Backpressure and rate limits to protect dependencies.
  • Timeouts and circuit breakers for slow or failing services.

Recovery playbooks

  • Automated retries with idempotent operations.
  • Graceful degradation paths for partial outages.
  • Chaos experiments to validate assumptions.

Game day planner

Game day planning board capturing scenarios, hypotheses, experiments, and learnings
Plan targeted chaos experiments and capture learnings to improve runbooks.
Schedule game days quarterly and invite cross-functional partners to broaden perspectives—then review shared guardrails in the Security toolkit.