Over the last decade, microservice architectures have become commonplace when designing scalable, maintainable, and independently deployable applications. Breaking down a system into multiple, domain-focused services, development squads can quickly develop, have varying technology stacks per service, and independently scale an application’s constituent pieces.

But this flexibility has its cost: operational complexity and failure propagation. Unlike monoliths, whose failures may be localized to one runtime, microservices communicate over networks. Each service-to-service invocation creates a possibility of latency, partial failure, or total unavailability. In a critical dependency, when this occurs, it causes cascading failures — where one service’s downtime propagates through the system, ruining the user experience or even causing complete outages.