Control Packs · REL-003 · v1.0.0

Dependency Rate and Load Protection

Protect a metered or fragile dependency from unbounded concurrency, retry amplification, and quota exhaustion.

Status: review · Review: not independent. This is design guidance; review status does not establish independent verification or compliance.

What this safeguard addresses

Bound concurrency and retries, apply backoff, respect provider limits, and fail safely when capacity is exhausted.

  • Failure handling amplifies dependency loadRetries, fan-out, or concurrent work exhaust a provider quota or make an outage worse.
Versioned applicability rule
{
  "all": [
    {
      "characteristic": "HIGH_COST_CONSUMPTION",
      "equals": true
    },
    {
      "characteristic": "EXTERNAL_DEPENDENCY",
      "equals": true
    }
  ]
}

Decisions for the project owner

Leave a decision open when its value is unknown. Suggested values become confirmed only through an explicit user decision.

  • Which concurrency, retry, and quota rules govern calls to the dependency?A generic retry loop cannot safely determine a dependency's capacity boundary.REL-003-Q1 · scope

Requirements for the coding agent

  • REL-003-R1Enforce bounded concurrency, timeouts, retry budgets, backoff, quota handling, and safe degradation for external dependencies.

Tests and evidence to retain

  • DEPENDENCY_LOAD_TESTExercise normal load, timeout, rate limit, retry budget, backoff, quota exhaustion, and degraded mode.
  • configuration_or_policy
  • implementation_location
  • test_result
  • telemetry_definition

Passing a published example shows that example's behavior. A coding agent's implementation report remains a claim until its evidence is independently checked.

Related guidance

  • SC-5 · Denial-of-Service ProtectionNIST_SP_800_53_5_2_0 · partially addressesBounded concurrency, retry budgets, and quota handling reduce overload amplification for the dependency boundary; they are not a complete denial-of-service control.
  • SC-6 · Resource AvailabilityNIST_SP_800_53_5_2_0 · partially addressesTimeouts, backoff, and bounded load protect a defined resource boundary; they do not establish overall availability.
  • SI-4 · System MonitoringNIST_SP_800_53_5_2_0 · partially addressesDependency load events support focused monitoring of retries and quotas; they do not cover system monitoring broadly.

Mappings indicate contextual relevance or partial support. They do not establish equivalence, certification, government endorsement, or complete framework implementation.

Continue your review