503 Service Unavailable

The server is currently unavailable due to temporary overloading or maintenance. There is a rather useful pattern that you can implement to avoid cascading failure in the instance of a malfunction in which the microservice will monitor its internal state and in the case of failure or overloading will refuse to accept the request and immediately signal this to the client. We will look at this pattern more in chapter xx; however, this instance is probably where you will be wanting to return a 503 status code. This could also be used as part of your health checks.