Beating the “Gate Rush”
Why Slow Start Matters for Resiliency and Operational Excellence
·967 words·5 mins
When a new pod comes online, it often experiences a gate rush: it’s declared “Ready,” immediately receives its full share of production traffic, and then falls over—spiking latency, throwing transient 5xx/504s, or flapping readiness. This is especially common for warm-up–sensitive services (JVM class loading/JIT, cache population, connection pool establishment, TLS handshakes, model loading, etc.).