Graceful degradation of services

Failure in any system is natural, graceful degradation is a key advantage of microservices. Failures are not cascaded to the entire system. Microservices are designed in such a way that microservices adhere to agreed service level agreements; if the service level agreements (SLAs) are not met, then the service is dropped. For example, coming back to our shopping microservice example, if our payment gateway is down, then further requests to that service are stopped until the service is up and running.