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I'm surprised they don't have automated degradation (or at least the article implies that it must be operator initiated).

We built a similar tool at Netflix but the degradations could be both manual and automatic.

There's definitely automated degradation at smaller scale ("if $random_feature's backend times out, don't show it", etc.).

The manual part of Defcon is more "holy crap, we lost a datacenter and the whole site is melting, turn stuff off to bring the load down ASAP"