Designing frontend systems for cloud latency, not just cloud failure (opens in new tab)

Frontend reliability is often discussed in terms of outages. Teams prepare for failed API calls, downtime and visible crashes because those failures are easy to recognize and measure. However, in many modern applications, the bigger challenge is not complete failure but latency. Systems rarely go fully offline. Instead, they become slow enough that users lose confidence in the interface long before anything technically breaks. Most frontend engineers have experienced this in production. A pag...