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Slow or failing dependencies block threads and response paths.
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Theoretical construct: explains a term, principle, or mental model.
Concrete cog in the system that works inside larger relationships.
A downstream dependency failure occurs when a service or storage layer cannot be reached, causing its caller to fail, slow down, or enter a cascade.
The topic was shaped by distributed systems and SRE practice because services cannot control the reliability of everything they call. Google documents resulting patterns such as timeouts, bounded retries, graceful degradation, and protection against cascading failures.
A restaurant can accept orders but cannot serve dishes without its kitchen. If the dining room waits forever, tables and staff fill up; a local problem spreads upward as overload.
The concept captures a concrete system property that affects engineering decisions.
This concept supports resilient interfaces with timeouts, backoff, fallbacks, load limits, and explicit behavior when an external service is unavailable.
This concept supports resilient interfaces with timeouts, backoff, fallbacks, load limits, and explicit behavior when an external service is unavailable.
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