This week we look at chapter 21 Handling Overload and chapter 22 Addressing Cascading Failures of Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems.

Sign up for the free companion discussion at bookclub.dev/thursdays. The discussion is from 7-9 pm eastern on Thursdays.

Overload is the leading cause of cascading failures.

Overload is what happens when a server gets more requests than it can handle. There are basic methods for relieving server overload:

  1. make the requests easier to process
  2. add more resources
  3. reduce the amount of traffic