Mastering JavaScript Design Patterns - Second Edition

Failure patterns

We have already touched upon some of the ways of dealing with failures in microservices in this chapter. There are, however, a couple of more interesting approaches we should consider. The first of these is service degradation.

Service degradation

This pattern could also be called graceful degradation and is related to progressive enhancement. Let us hark back to the example of replacing the Pythagorean distance function with the haversine equivalent. If the haversine service is down for some reason, the less demanding function could be used in its place without a huge impact on users. In fact, they may not notice it at all. It isn't ideal that users have a worse version of the service but it is certainly more desirable than simply ...