Putting a person in the path sounds simple until it meets real infrastructure. Something has to wait, and everything between your application and the internet has an opinion about how long it is willing to wait. Usually about sixty seconds.
What it changes for the business
- Approvals can take as long as people take. An hour, or overnight, costs nothing, so the control survives contact with actual working days.
- It scales past the pilot. Pending approvals consume nothing, so a hundred outstanding decisions is the same load as none.
- Restarts and deploys are safe. Maintenance during a pending approval does not lose it, so the control does not constrain your release schedule.
- Fewer surprises in production. Nothing sits in a timeout that behaves differently under load than it did in testing.
How it works, briefly
The request is declined immediately, with an answer that says clearly this is not final. The question goes to the person, and the caller tries again, as software already does when something is temporarily unavailable. On the retry it proceeds, or is refused, or is told to keep waiting.
| How this is handled elsewhere | How Squidder does it |
|---|---|
| Hold the connection until someone answers | Nothing is held open |
| Approvals bounded by an idle timeout | Bounded only by the person |
| A restart loses whatever was in flight | Pending decisions survive it |
| Slow approvals exhaust the connection pool | Pending approvals cost nothing |
| Works in a demo, fails at volume | The same at one or a thousand |
Where it fits, and where it does not
The calling software has to be willing to try again. Nearly everything already is, because retrying is how software has always handled a service being briefly unavailable, but a system that treats any refusal as permanent is worth checking once before you rely on this.
Where to start
Trigger an approval and leave it unanswered for an hour while watching your connection count. Nothing is held. Answer it, let the caller retry, and the work completes as though the pause cost nothing.