Reliability patterns: limits, backpressure and load shedding
Keep the service up when demand exceeds capacity: bounded queues sized with Little's law, admission control, priorities, cancellation, degradation, retry budgets, graceful shutdown, dependency failures, game days and a runbook template.
14 min·Verified 2026-11Pro+50 XP
Every system has a capacity. Reliability is about what happens at and beyond it. LLM serving makes this sharper than ordinary web serving because requests are slow (seconds to minutes), expensive (a GPU slot each) and variable (a 50-token and a 4,000-token answer differ by 80 times). Without deliberate limits, a modest spike turns into an outage.
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