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Concept for defining alternative behaviors when primary functions fail to preserve availability and user experience.
Fallback strategies define alternative behaviors when primary functions fail, reducing downtime and preserving usability. They include patterns such as graceful degradation, circuit breakers, and default responses and are applied at architectural and implementation levels to increase system reliability and recovery capabilities.
Share of requests that enter a fallback path.
Average time to recover the primary function.
Measure of perceived user harm from fallback events.
Frontend reduces image quality and loads text first to keep core functionality available.
Service protects itself from repeated API errors by opening the circuit breaker and falling back to cache.
Mobile app displays locally stored content and an offline notice when the network is unavailable.
Identify critical paths and dependencies.
Define fallback behavior and metrics per path.
Implement patterns (retry, circuit breaker, cache) with tests.
Monitor fallback events and iterate rules based on metrics.