Uber Automates Dependency Analysis Across Its Service Mesh
InfoQ, Friday, October 16th, 2026
Uber classifies service dependencies as fail-close or fail-open by correlating caller and callee failures in RPC middleware.
Uber built an automated way to map service dependencies and classify how downstream failures propagate across its service mesh.
RPC middleware correlates caller and callee failures on production requests, labeling dependencies as fail-close (failure consistently breaks the caller), fail-open or unknown, and these classifications are applied across call paths to trace failures back to originating APIs.
Uber considered distributed tracing but found sampling too slow to catch rare failures.
The system has cataloged dependencies for critical APIs and indexed most fail-close anomalies.