Naiʻa
Hawaiian for dolphin — pods that coordinate to protect their own
Cloudflare stops attackers.
Circuit breakers stop services.
Nobody stops cascades.
One overloaded service. Forty dependent services. Seconds to collapse.
Your edge can't see it. Your mesh can't coordinate it. Your observability tools detect it after the damage is done.
$14K/min
enterprise downtime cost ¹
37min
to detect — hours to resolve ²
#1
outage cause: cascading failure ³
Istio, Envoy, Linkerd — per-sidecar state. No fleet coordination.
Resilience4j, Hystrix, Polly — per-service libraries. No shared intelligence.
Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic — detect after the fact. Don't prevent.
Every service mesh, every circuit breaker library, every observability platform — confirmed. None coordinate proactive cascade prevention across your fleet.
Naiʻa is the missing layer.
Coordinated probing — one instance tests recovery, not your entire fleet.
Predictive correlation — we know Service C will fail before it does.
Fleet-wide shield mode — shed non-critical traffic in milliseconds, not hours.
What follows is real execution — the actual engine running in your browser. 40 services under a coordinated multi-vector attack. Two identical fleets. Same attack. Same seed. Every state change is a real engine decision.
¹ EMA/BigPanda 2024 ² New Relic 2024 Observability Forecast ³ Google SRE Book, Ch. 22