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Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)

A malicious or accidental flood of traffic designed to overwhelm a system and make it unavailable to legitimate users.

Detailed Explanation

While traditional DDoS attacks are external and malicious, modern microservice architectures often experience 'friendly fire' DDoS when aggressive retry loops or uncontrolled traffic spikes overwhelm internal services.

Why It Matters

It completely blocks legitimate traffic, causing total system outages and massive spikes in infrastructure costs.

Common Failure Mode

Implementing naive retry logic without exponential backoff, causing a minor latency blip to spiral into a self-inflicted DDoS attack.

Practical Example

Thousands of clients aggressively retrying a failed API request every second, completely crushing the database.

Production Manifestation

Saturated network bandwidth, exhausted connection pools, unresponsive APIs, and failing health checks.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) in short?

A malicious or accidental flood of traffic designed to overwhelm a system and make it unavailable to legitimate users.

What is the most common failure mode?

Implementing naive retry logic without exponential backoff, causing a minor latency blip to spiral into a self-inflicted DDoS attack.

AI Summary

A malicious or accidental flood of traffic designed to overwhelm a system and make it unavailable to legitimate users. It completely blocks legitimate traffic, causing total system outages and massive spikes in infrastructure costs.