Glossary · Reliability & operations
Admission Control
A pre-acceptance gate that decides whether a request may enter a bounded queue or service under the system's current capacity, priority, and policy.
Why it matters
Rejecting excess work at a controlled boundary protects admitted requests from queue growth, timeout cascades, and resource exhaustion.
In practice
Estimate the request's cost, check tenant and system capacity, reserve the required budget atomically, and identify the overloaded scope when rejecting. Give retry guidance only when the condition is transient and the caller's retry budget permits another attempt.
Common confusion
Admission control acts before acceptance. Load shedding can reject or remove work at ingress, in queues, at dependencies, or at other overload boundaries.
Related terms
Sources
Browse the learning paths to see this term in context — every lesson is free to read.