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Since we are using the power abstraction, why not instead of load shedding, start up secondary machines servicing, which are slower, but could handle a bunch of simultaneous requests for some clients, or even tertiary ones?

That could at least postpone the load shedding, or handle localised surges in service demand due to user behaviour more effectively.

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Sometimes there's limits to how high you can scale without overloading dependencies. For example, the database that the service accesses might only support n connections and the service is already using approximately n connections.

The article is in Germany for me so I've only read a part of it before I got tired of trying to read German, but I think they mention as one of the first things that what you describe, preventing an overload in the first place, is their primary strategy.

The request dropping (less jargon-y and more descriptive than "load shedding", which refers to consuming more rather than less) only kicks in when that fails or isn't fast enough.

This official PDF should be in English: https://d1.awsstatic.com/builderslibrary/pdfs/using-load-she...

You can change language in the footer, waaay down.

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