Design approach where a system continues to operate with reduced functionality when parts fail, rather than completely breaking. Like a car's limp mode that lets you drive slowly to a mechanic when there's an engine problem.
When YouTube's recommendation system is overloaded, it gracefully degrades by showing a simplified list instead of crashing, ensuring you can still watch videos even if suggestions aren't personalized.
Graceful Degradation is an architecture and design pattern, not a single managed cloud service. All major clouds support it through building blocks like load balancers, autoscaling, health checks, feature flags, caching, queues, and multi-region designs.