It's Actors All The Way Down

[Update 2014-02-02: I’ve posted a video showing a visualization of this pattern at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEXh1WoppMU] In a loosely-coupled system connected with asynchronous messages, a flood of client requests can exceed the capacity of a service. When this happens, we would prefer that the service respond with an indication of the overloaded condition, rather than making us […]