Graceful Degradation—Failing with Style

We do a lot to reduce the chance that our application is down, forgetting that it will eventually happen. We should be focusing on not reducing the risk of failure, but reducing its impact – this is widely known as Graceful Degradation. Adopting a Graceful Degradation strategy suggests that it is possible to provide the service for your customers even if certain parts of your application do not behave as expected. Failure should not be an exception in software, it should be the rule. That is why Graceful Degradation is such a key concept in software delivery. Resiliency is about having the ability to bounce back when things don’t go as planned. Failures are inevitable, but what can we do to build resilience to give us a bit more time to bounce back? We make use of engineering as well as team collaboration, using skills across various disciplines to gain transparency over performance and reduce the immediate impact of failures. In this session, we’ll focus on resiliency testing and its importance. We’ll also look at how we can leverage monitoring and feedback processes from platform and DevOps to help teams recover from incidents and find time for that extra cup of coffee!