• Implement circuit breakers on all external API calls so a single slow dependency doesn't cascade.
• Set conservative timeout limits (e.g. 5s) on all outbound API calls and handle timeout errors gracefully.
• Add APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tracing to identify p95/p99 latency hotspots before they cause incidents.
• Configure autoscaling triggers at 60% CPU/memory rather than 80% to give lead time for scale-out.
• Run weekly load tests against staging to surface performance regressions before production deployment.