Aglet

Learn from API dependency outages

The durable lesson is a boundary between dependency confidence and local action. Preserve the outage class, fallback state, and reconciliation decision that mattered. Record which facts are current, stale, pending, or unknown, and which recovery observations remain outside the client.

Keep the lesson for the next incident

  1. Document degraded states

    Record dependency classes, local pending state, stale fallback age, retry and readback policy, freshness label, visible recovery, and side-effect limits. Define which operation classes may continue and who owns reconciliation.

  2. Keep recovery fixtures

    Retain healthy, timeout, connection, rate, permanent rejection, stale, no-fallback, recovery, read, and write cases with synthetic resources. Store expected freshness and local state. Include the original outage-shaped failure. Preserve freshness beside each fixture.

  3. Review outage signals

    Watch dependency failures, stale age, fallback use, unknown writes, reconciliation backlog, and recovery transitions by endpoint and client. Assign an owner and threshold. Close the follow-up only when essential callers exercise the degraded-state contract.

What to carry forward

Close learning with failure classes, freshness rules, fixtures, fallback and reconciliation owners, and outage signals. Keep external recovery limits explicit. The useful outcome is a truthful degraded state and safe next action, not a promise of uninterrupted dependency access. Review fallback use after recovery.

Technical background: RFC Editor reference.

Keep the decision with the work.

Use a Work Item in Aglet to record the problem, the evidence you have, and the next decision. Add an owner and priority, then keep updates in the discussion so the next person can follow the reasoning.

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