Release It!, 2nd Edition

Unbalanced Capacities

Whether your resources take months, weeks, or seconds to provision, you can end up with mismatched ratios between different layers. That makes it possible for one tier or service to flood another with requests beyond its capacity. This especially holds when you deal with calls to rate-limited or throttled APIs!

In the illustration, the front-end service has 3,000 request-handling threads available. During peak usage, the majority of these will be serving product catalog pages or search results. Some smaller number will be in various corporate “telling” pages. A few will be involved in a checkout process.

Of the threads ...