The Circuit Breaker pattern is a resilience design pattern that prevents cascading failures in distributed systems. It works like an electrical circuit breaker - when failures reach a threshold, it "opens" and stops calling the failing service, allowing it time to recover. Problems it solves:
Prevents resource exhaustion from repeated calls to failing services
Stops cascading failures across microservices
Provides fail-fast behavior instead of hanging requests
Allows graceful degradation of functionality Circuit Breaker states:
Closed: Normal operation, requests pass through to the service
Open: Failure threshold exceeded, requests fail immediately without calling the service
Half-Open: Testing mode to check if the downstream service has recovered
Rewriting in plainer words…
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