DIFFERENTIATED SERVICE-BASED GRACEFUL DEGRADATION LAYER

The differentiated service-based graceful degradation layer (DSGDL) allows cloud-based architectures to operate through and recover from periods of limited capability. The DSGDL protects and continues serving higher priority requests with the best possible response even as the underlying cloud-based services deteriorate. The DSGDL offloads lower priority requests to lower-grade secondary capability that can be provisioned on-the-fly in order to reserve the best capability for maintaining high priority service (e.g., by re-directing lower priority requests to a slightly out-of-date cached dataset, and reserve the primary consistent database for higher priority requests). The DSGDL 1) implements an overlay network over existing cloud services to route and enforce priority requests, and 2) provisions on-demand computing nodes and sites to provide secondary capability for service requests as needed.