meetupliveresilience

Community Meetup: Live Building a Micro App that Detects Provider Outages and Switches Fallbacks

UUnknown

2026-02-17

10 min read

Host a live meetup building a micro app that detects provider outages and automatically switches fallbacks—complete with health checks, monitoring, and UX.

Nothing slows a team more than a third‑party outage after launch. Users see errors, crash reports flood in, and product owners ask why a single API failure took down a feature. If you host a meetup or livestream to teach resilient app design, the most useful demo is a small, live micro app that detects upstream outages and switches to fallbacks automatically—while showing the monitoring hooks, health checks and UX that keep users happy.

What you'll get from this meetup

In this session you’ll follow a live build of a micro mobile app (React Native + Expo) with a polyglot backend that:

Detects provider outages via health checks and synthetic monitoring
Switches to fallback providers using a circuit‑breaker + feature flag strategy
Exposes metrics and traces for troubleshooting (OpenTelemetry + Prometheus)
Implements UX patterns for graceful degradation (banners, skeletons, offline mode)
Is suitable for a one‑hour livestream with follow‑up hands‑ons

The 2026 context: why this matters now

Late 2025 and early 2026 reminded engineering teams how brittle reliance on a single provider can be. High‑profile outages (e.g., the Jan 2026 Cloudflare incident that affected major platforms) show that even globally distributed CDNs and security providers can have cascading effects. At the same time, trends like widespread adoption of edge functions, AI‑assisted development, and polyglot backends make multi‑provider architectures common—and failure modes more varied.

That means teams must be deliberate: instrumented health checks, robust fallback strategies, and clear UX are no longer optional. Live demos that show how to detect outages and switch to fallbacks give real operational value—and make great meetup content that developers actually apply.

Meetup agenda (60–90 minutes)

10 min — Quick context and failure postmortems (why outages matter)
15 min — Architecture walk: micro app + polyglot backend
25 min — Live coding: health checks, circuit breaker and fallback selection
15 min — Observability and monitoring hooks (metrics, traces, logs)
10 min — UX for degraded experiences and live QA
Optional breakout — Pair labs and repo exercises

Architecture: simple, realistic, and polyglot

Keep the demo approachable. Use an Expo React Native frontend and two tiny backend services that simulate upstream providers: Provider A (Node/Express) and Provider B (Go or Python FastAPI). Put a lightweight gateway (Node) in front that implements the outage detection and fallback logic. This polyglot setup mirrors real ecosystems where dependencies are heterogeneous.

Components

Mobile client: Expo app that requests data (e.g., price quotes, content or feed) from the gateway
Gateway: Implements health checks, circuit breaker, fallback selection, feature flags, and exposes metrics
Provider A & B: Simple services that return sample payloads; one will be intentionally taken down during the demo
Monitoring: OpenTelemetry traces, Prometheus metrics, and a simple dashboard (Grafana or hosted APM)
Feature flags: LaunchDarkly, Unleash, or a simple flags endpoint to toggle fallback behavior live

Live code: health checks and outage detection

Start with a standard /healthz endpoint for every provider and gateway. Health checks should return service status, version and a short latency sample. Keep the contract tiny and parseable.

Example: Provider health endpoint (Express)

app.get('/healthz', (req, res) => {
  res.json({
    status: 'ok',
    version: process.env.APP_VERSION || '1.0.0',
    uptime: process.uptime()
  });
});

In production you’ll expand this to check DB connectivity, caches, and downstream calls. For the meetup, keep it deterministic so you can flip a provider offline during the stream.

Circuit breaker + failure detector (gateway)

Use a small, battle‑tested library (opossum in Node, or a simple implementation) or implement a minimal circuit breaker. The breaker tracks recent failures, opens when thresholds are exceeded, and closes after a cooldown.

// Simplified JS circuit-breaker-like wrapper
async function requestWithFallback(urls, opts = {}) {
  for (const url of urls) {
    const state = circuitState[url] || { failures: 0, openUntil: 0 };
    if (Date.now() < state.openUntil) continue; // skip open provider

    try {
      const res = await fetch(url, { timeout: opts.timeout || 2000 });
      if (!res.ok) throw new Error('non-2xx');
      circuitState[url] = { failures: 0, openUntil: 0 };
      return await res.json();
    } catch (err) {
      state.failures = (state.failures || 0) + 1;
      if (state.failures >= (opts.maxFailures || 3)) {
        state.openUntil = Date.now() + (opts.cooldownMs || 30_000);
        // emit metric: circuit.open
      }
      circuitState[url] = state;
      // emit metric: request.failure
    }
  }
  throw new Error('All providers failed');
}

This wrapper tries providers in order; it skips providers whose circuit is open and emits metrics you can scrape.

Feature flags: safe switches during demo

Feature flags let you change fallback behavior mid‑stream without redeploying. Use a hosted flag system, or a tiny flags endpoint that the gateway polls. During the meetup you can toggle between:

Failover priority (Provider B as primary)
Graceful degrade (return cached data)
Offline mode (UI switches to local store)

Expose the flag toggle in the livestream UI and show the audience how traffic changes and how metrics update in real time.

Monitoring hooks: metrics, logs and traces

Make observability visible from the start. Inject simple counters and histograms in the gateway and providers. Use OpenTelemetry for traces and add Prometheus metrics for quick dashboards.

Prometheus metrics (example)

const { Counter, Histogram } = require('prom-client');
const requests = new Counter({ name: 'gateway_requests_total', help: 'Total requests' });
const failures = new Counter({ name: 'gateway_failures_total', help: 'Total failures' });
const latency = new Histogram({ name: 'gateway_request_duration_seconds', help: 'Request latency' });

app.get('/metrics', async (req, res) => {
  res.set('Content-Type', register.contentType);
  res.end(await register.metrics());
});

During the demo show real‑time graphs: request rate, error rate per provider, and circuit open/close events. Explain how SLOs and error budgets guide when to switch strategies (e.g., return cached data vs. block new requests).

UX: how to tell users, gently

When a provider outage hits, the technical fix is only half the job. UX must set expectations and reduce user frustration. Demonstrate three patterns live:

1. Persistent, contextual banner

Use a dismissible banner at the top of the screen: "Some features are temporarily degraded — using offline data." Include an action: "Retry" or "Switch provider".

2. Content placeholders and graceful degradation

When live data is unavailable, show cached content or skeletons with timestamped badges: "Showing cached results from 2m ago." That reduces perceived failure impact and prevents empty states.

3. Actionable error flows

Give users a path: retry, manual provider toggle (if appropriate), or contact support. In the livestream, simulate a user tapping retry while the gateway performs a freshness check. Communicating outages clearly is a discipline — see best practices for platform communication during incidents (how to communicate an outage without triggering scams).

// React Native: show banner when app reports degraded mode
function DegradedBanner({ mode, onRetry }) {
  if (!mode) return null;
  return (
    <View style={styles.banner}>
      <Text>Service degraded: using fallback data</Text>
      <Button title="Retry" onPress={onRetry} />
    </View>
  );
}

Testing and synthetic monitoring

Before the stream, configure a synthetic check that hits the gateway every 30s. This becomes a reliable indicator of failures for the audience and a source of alerts. During the demo, intentionally break Provider A (flip a firewall or stop the container) and let the synthetic check show failure cascading to the monitoring dashboard.

Automated chaos, safely

Run a small, controlled chaos experiment: fail a provider for 60 seconds. This demonstrates auto‑failover behavior and gives you live metrics to discuss. Pair this with local-testing and hosted-tunnel tooling so attendees can reproduce the experiment (hosted tunnels and local testing).

Advanced strategies for production

Use the meetup to move beyond basics and discuss production‑grade patterns:

Backpressure: Apply queueing or rate limits when fallbacks face bursts.
Adaptive timeouts: Tune timeouts by percentile latency observed in production (p95/p99).
Cached stale‑while‑revalidate: Serve stale data fast and refresh in background.
SLO-driven automation: Tie automated fallback triggers to SLO breaches and error budget consumption.
Polyglot health checks: Standardize health schema across languages and platforms (status, dependencies, latencyMs)
Feature flag telemetry: Record flag evaluations alongside traces to debug rollout issues.

Hands‑on repo and code snippets

Provide a ready‑to‑fork GitHub repo with branches for each step of the demo. Include a simple Makefile or scripts to start services locally with Docker Compose or a devcontainer so attendees can reproduce the live stream. A sample README should include:

Start: docker compose up
Run: expo start for the mobile app
Toggle provider: scripts/up.sh and scripts/down.sh to simulate outages
View metrics: http://localhost:9090 (Prometheus) and Grafana dashboards

For guidance on scaling small micro apps and cloud pipelines that support reliable demos, see a compact case study on cloud pipelines for micro apps (using cloud pipelines to scale a microjob app).

Troubleshooting checklist for livestreams

Prewarm containers to avoid cold starts during demo; consider cloud pipeline techniques to prebuild artifacts (cloud pipelines case study).
Record a short clip of the full flow as a backup if live issues occur
Use a stable cloud provider for the monitoring stack (hosted Grafana, Prometheus remote write)
Have a second presenter handle chat/questions while the main host codes

Why this format works for learning paths and community events

People learn by seeing failure modes and recovery live. A meetup that mixes coding, observability and UX gives developers concrete patterns to apply. Micro apps and “vibe‑coding” persisted through 2025 into 2026: quickly built, personal, and focused projects are ideal for demonstrating operational best practices without enterprise complexity. If you run community events, combine this format with tested engagement tactics for hybrid meetups (advanced hybrid pop-up strategies).

"Seeing the outage in the dashboard and then watching the circuit breaker open—live—teaches far more than slides ever could."

Future predictions (2026 and beyond)

Expect these trends to continue shaping how we handle upstream failures:

Observability becomes the default: OpenTelemetry adoption keeps rising; traces + metrics + logs converge in hosted APMs.
Edge fallback logic: Fallbacks move closer to the edge (edge functions pick different upstreams) to reduce latency during provider swaps — see practical edge strategies (edge orchestration and security for live streaming).
AI ops assistants: Automated runbooks will recommend fallback strategies and tune circuit breakers based on historical incidents.
Standardized health schemas: Teams will adopt small, interoperable health payloads for easier cross‑language checks.

Actionable takeaway checklist (what to implement after the meetup)

Add /healthz endpoints to every service with status, version and latency samples.
Implement a gateway circuit breaker that tracks failures and opens circuits on threshold breaches.
Expose Prometheus metrics and instrument traces with OpenTelemetry.
Add feature flags to control fallback strategies without redeploys.
Design clear UX for degraded states: banners, cached content, and retry controls.
Run a small, controlled chaos test in staging to validate failovers (use hosted tunnels and local testing to make experiments reproducible: hosted tunnels & local testing).

Running the meetup: tips for engagement

Start with a short failure postmortem (recent outage example) to hook attention.
Use live metrics dashboards as a visual anchor for the audience.
Encourage participants to fork the repo and follow along in breakout rooms; recruit attendees with micro-event tactics (micro-event recruitment playbook).
Publish the recording and a short “follow‑up lab” with exercises and answers.

Closing: build trust by design

Outage detection and graceful fallbacks are practical skills that lower user friction and reduce incident impact. A livestream that builds a micro app demonstrating these patterns delivers immediate, reusable value to attendees—developers, SREs, and product leads alike. By combining health checks, circuit breakers, feature flags and clear UX, you teach attendees to build resilient systems that survive the next major provider outage.

Call to action

Ready to run this meetup or join one? Fork the starter repo, load the Expo app, and run the scripted chaos test. If you want a turnkey kit for your community event (slides, repo, and dashboard templates), join our next live session—register on the project page or subscribe for the meetup kit we release after each stream.

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