Fan-Out Request Explosion
A recent request-path change now fans the product-detail request out to all five downstream services instead of a narrower previous set. Pricing, inventory, shipping estimate, and tax calculation are all required for a complete, correct response to the customer. Recommendation enrichment is supplementary cross-sell content — the product page is still complete and correct without it. One of the five downstream services is now responding slowly under the increased call volume, and the aggregator's overall latency and customer success rate are degrading as a result. Diagnose which dependency is actually the constraint, decide what the aggregator can safely do without it, and bring the response path back to a durable, sustainable state without quietly overloading any of the services the response actually depends on.
- Difficulty
- Staff
- Expected Time
- ~20 min
- Category
- Microservices & Dependencies
Skills
- Distinguishing core dependencies from optional enrichment in an aggregated response
- Recognizing when a mitigation shifts pressure onto a different subsystem
- Evaluating timeout and partial-response tradeoffs across parallel downstream calls
- Judging whether a recovered customer metric is actually safe to hand back
System Architecture
- API
- Aggregator
- Service A (Pricing)
- Service B (Inventory)
- Service C (Shipping Estimate)
- Service D (Tax Calculation)
- Service E (Recommendation Enrichment)
This is a Pro scenario. Upgrade to Pro to unlock it.
Upgrade to ProBack to Incidents