A microservice architecture is modeled as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Each service may depend on other services. Traffic enters the system through a single entry point service, which receives a load factor of 1. When a service with load factor L depends on N downstream services, each downstream service receives an additional load of L (the load is duplicated to each dependency, not divided).

A service that is reachable through multiple paths accumulates load from all paths. ...