load shedding

A two-second dependency should cost you latency, not three services. The mechanics are arithmetic: Little's law plus retry amplification. The fix is a budget, not a ban.

The Indian e-commerce interview question, and autoscaling is the wrong first answer. A 10x spike arriving in seconds outruns any scaling loop, so the design has to absorb rather than scale.

The Google-style NALSD round in miniature. The boxes are easy; what is being scored is whether the numbers fall out of Little's law before you draw them.

Every overloaded system dies the same way: queues turn load into latency, latency into timeouts, timeouts into retry storms. Tiered shedding, deadline propagation, and retry budgets are the design.