Designing for 'Graceful Degradation' in Node.js Applications

Graceful degradation is a design philosophy where an application remains partially functional even when some components fail, rather than crashing entirely.

In a Node.js microservices setup, if the 'Recommendation Service' is down, the 'Product Page' should still load but show a 'Trending Items' static list or nothing at all. This involves: 1. Timeouts for all downstream calls, 2. Default/Fallback values, 3. UI flags to hide broken features. This improves the 'Availability' in CAP theorem terms.