# How SRE Teams Use Load Shedding to Protect Critical Services

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-site-reliability-podcast-with-fexingo-sre-uptime-and-production-engineering-7871923/how-sre-teams-use-load-shedding-to-protect-critical-services
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-site-reliability-podcast-with-fexingo-sre-uptime-and-production-engineering-7871923/how-sre-teams-use-load-shedding-to-protect-critical-services.md
Podcast: [The Site Reliability Podcast with Fexingo: SRE, Uptime, and Production Engineering](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-site-reliability-podcast-with-fexingo-sre-uptime-and-production-engineering-7871923)
Published: 2026-07-16T22:32:03+00:00
Episode link: https://audio.fexingo.com/business/the-site-reliability-podcast/episode-0115.mp3
Audio file: https://audio.fexingo.com/business/the-site-reliability-podcast/episode-0115.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-site-reliability-podcast-with-fexingo-sre-uptime-and-production-engineering-7871923/episodes/how-sre-teams-use-load-shedding-to-protect-critical-services
Duration seconds: 753

## Resource

Site reliability engineers have a last-resort play when traffic overwhelms their systems: load shedding. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore how companies like Google and Amazon use intentional, tiered request-dropping to keep their most critical services alive during demand spikes. They break down the difference between load shedding and rate limiting, discuss why many teams get the prioritization wrong, and walk through a real-world example involving a streaming platform's checkout service during a major sale event. Listeners will learn how to design priority-aware request queues, why every microservice should have a defined shedding order, and how to test load shedding in game days without causing real downtime. This episode offers a concrete playbook for any SRE team looking to answer the question: when you have to say no, whom do you say no to first? #LoadShedding #SiteReliabilityEngineering #SRE #ProductionEngineering #TrafficManagement #PriorityQueues #CapacityPlanning #ResilienceEngineering #IncidentResponse #FaultTolerance #GoogleSRE #AmazonPrimeDay #CheckoutService #GameDays #Uptime #TechOps #Technology #FexingoBusiness Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo

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