Why is enforcing the availability of dependencies on start-up not recommended?

Enforcing the availability of dependencies on start-up is not recommended primarily because in a distributed system, it is crucial to gracefully handle unavailability. This approach is essential for maintaining system resilience and robustness. In practical scenarios, services may not always be available at start-up due to various reasons, such as network issues, service outages, or initialization sequences.

By enforcing strict availability checks at start-up, applications can become overly rigid and prone to failure if dependencies are not immediately accessible. Instead, embracing a design that anticipates and manages such unavailability allows systems to continue functioning in a degraded mode or retry connections, thereby enhancing overall user experience and service reliability.

In contrast, while factors such as application start-up time, potential outages cascading through systems, and complexities in configuration management are relevant considerations, they are secondary to the overarching need for systems to be resilient and able to cope with the unpredictable nature of distributed environments. Therefore, the ability to deal with dependence on availability gracefully is a fundamental best practice in modern application architecture.