Managing communication rates between applications in a tiered application computing environment

A computing apparatus comprising:

• a storage system;
• a processing system operatively coupled to the storage system;
• and
• program instructions stored on the storage system that, when executed by the processing system, direct the computing apparatus to:
• monitor load information associated with applications in a tiered application environment, wherein each of the applications executes using one or more virtual nodes;
• determine that the load information associated with a first application in a first tier of the applications satisfies one or more load criteria;
• identify at least one other application of the applications in a different tier above the first tier;
• and
• communicate a notification to the at least one application to modify a configuration for communicating requests in the tiered application environment.

An apparatus comprising:

• a storage system;
• program instructions stored on the storage system that, when executed by a processing system of a computing system, direct the computing system to:
• monitor load information associated with applications in a tiered application environment, wherein each of the applications executes using one or more virtual nodes;
• determine that the load information associated with a first application in a first tier of the applications satisfies one or more load criteria;
• identify two or more applications of the applications in different tiers above the first application;
• and
• communicate a notification to the two or more applications to modify a configuration for communicating requests in the tiered application environment.