Reliability is critical, specifically, when services are interconnected, and failures in one component can lead to cascading effect on other services. The Circuit Breaker Pattern is an important design pattern used to build fault tolerant and resilient systems. Particularly in microservices architecture. This article explains the fundamentals of the circuit breaker pattern, its benefits, and how to implement it to protect your systems from failure.
What is the Circuit Breaker Pattern?
The Circuit Breaker Pattern is actually inspired by electrical circuit breakers you see at your home, which is designed to prevent system failures by detecting faults and stopping the flow of electricity when problems occur. In software, this pattern monitors service interactions, preventing continuous calls/retries to a failing/failed service, which could overload the service with problem. by “Breaking” the circuit between services, this pattern allows a system to gracefully handle failures and avoid cascading problems.
