[TazeTSchnitzel]

> We had inadvertently added a hard dependency on our Redis cluster being available within the boot path of our application code.

I seem to recall a recent post on here about how you shouldn't have such hard dependencies. It's good advice.

Incidentally, this type of dependency is unlikely to happen if you have a shared-nothing model (like PHP has, for instance), because in such a system each request is isolated and tries to connect on its own.