This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Amy Unger at RailsConf 2018 titled "Knobs, buttons & switches: Operating your application at scale."
We've all seen applications that keel over when a single, upstream service goes down. Despite our best intentions, sometimes an unexpected outage has us scrambling to make repairs. In this blog post, we'll take a look at some tools you can integrate into your application before disaster strikes. We'll talk about seven strategies that can help you shed load, fail gracefully, and protect struggling services. We'll also talk about the technical implementations of these techniques—particularly in Ruby, though the...