# Graceful Shutdown And Degradation

> Implement graceful shutdown and controlled degradation so in-flight work is respected and users experience minimal disruption during failures or deploys. Use when handling SIGTERM, rolling deploys, or partial system failures.

- Skill: `itsual/graceful-shutdown-and-degradation` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add itsual/graceful-shutdown-and-degradation`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/itsual/graceful-shutdown-and-degradation/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- Author: itsual (https://skillmd.com/u/itsual)
- Updated: 2026-09-21
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/itsual/graceful-shutdown-and-degradation

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# Graceful Shutdown and Degradation

## Overview

Systems should stop accepting new work cleanly, finish or checkpoint in-flight work, and degrade predictably when dependencies fail.

## When to Use

- Implementing shutdown hooks for services
- Improving behavior during deployments or scaling events
- Designing fallbacks for when dependencies are unavailable

## Key Practices

- Listen for termination signals and stop accepting new requests promptly
- Drain in-flight requests with a reasonable timeout
- Close connections and flush critical state
- Degrade functionality instead of failing completely when possible
- Make degraded mode visible (metrics, user messaging if appropriate)

## Principles

- Prefer controlled degradation over cascading failure
- Failures should be obvious to operators
- Shutdown should be safe to trigger frequently (as in rolling deploys)

## Verification

- Rolling deploys do not drop significant in-flight work
- Dependency failures produce predictable, observable degradation