Collection
Keep useful work flowing when demand exceeds capacity
Apply queue, capacity, fairness and overload-control ideas to software, agent fleets and operational workflows so backlog, retries and one noisy workload do not turn pressure into collapse.
12 elements · Explore in any order.
5 principles · 7 protocols
12 elements
Find the breaking point before production finds it for you
Capacity is a fact you discover by pressure, not a number you inherit from last year's diagram.
Read the idea PrincipleKeep headroom for variability and recovery
Slack looks inefficient until the first spike, outage or slow task arrives.
Read the idea ProtocolGive queued work an expiry condition
A queue can preserve work long enough to make it useless.
Read the idea ProtocolMove poison work out of the main queue
One bad item should not get infinite turns at the front of the line.
Read the idea PrinciplePush back on intake before the backlog becomes the outage
A growing queue is a message from capacity, not a storage success story.
Read the idea ProtocolIsolate concurrency for the slow dependency
A slow neighbor should not be allowed to rent the whole building.
Read the idea ProtocolGive shared capacity a noisy-neighbor rule
First-come-first-served can become whoever-spams-most-wins.
Read the idea PrincipleFail work that cannot meet its useful deadline
Late work can consume real resources while producing zero useful result.
Read the idea ProtocolOpen the circuit when a dependency keeps failing
Sometimes the kindest request to a failing service is the one you do not send.
Read the idea ProtocolDefine the cheaper mode that preserves the core function
Degraded and useful beats complete and unavailable.
Read the idea PrincipleLet reliability data slow feature velocity when the budget is spent
Reliability work needs permission to outrank new features before the next outage makes the choice for you.
Read the idea PrincipleUse queueing only when delayed work remains valuable
A queue stores pressure; it does not create capacity.
Read the idea