Feature Flag Management Process
If the cloud cannot provide required resources in time, the features provided by application components are degraded gracefully to replace or disable unimportant ones in order to keep vital features operational.
 |
How can the performance of an application degrade gracefully, if the experienced workload increases but additional cloud resources are unavailable or take too long to provision? |
Context
While the elasticity of clouds generally allows a tight alignment of resource numbers to the experienced workload, the time it takes to provision new resources remains as a limiting factor. If the workload increases too drastically, it may take too long to provision new resources. Furthermore, cloud providers often do not guarantee concrete provisioning times.
Solution
Less important application functionality provided by application component instances is disabled or replaced with a less demanding implementation, if the cloud provider cannot fulfill current workload demands. When resources can eventually be provisioned again, the application components return to normal operation.
Related Patterns
Managed Configuration, Multi-Component Image, Standby Pooling Process