Oh absolutely, I wouldn't use this for any production system. It would be a toy hobby project. I just find the notion of turning a no-degradation failure mode into a gradual-degradation one fascinating for some reason.
> the failure mode is the opposite of graceful degradation. It’s not like there’s an increasing percentage of requests that fail as you get closer to the deadline. Instead, in one minute, everything’s working just fine, and in the next minute, every http request fails.
This has given me some interesting food for thought. I wonder how feasible it would be to create a toy webserver that did exactly this (failing an increasing percentage of requests as the deadline approaches)? My thought would be to start failing some requests as the deadline approaches a point where most would consider it "far too late" (e.g. 4 hours before `notAfter`). At this point, start responding to some percentage of requests with a custom HTTP status code (599 for the sake of example).
Probably a lot less useful than just monitoring each webserver endpoint's TLS cert using synthetics, but it's given me an idea for a fun project if nothing else.