Circuit Breaker Pattern

The Circuit Breaker Pattern is a design strategy used in distributed systems to detect failures and encapsulate the logic of preventing a failure from constantly recurring.

Essentially, it "trips" when a service or component is experiencing failures, preventing additional requests from being sent to that failing service.

This stops errors from propagating through the system, allowing fallback mechanisms to take over or letting the system recover gracefully.

1. Why Use the Circuit Breaker Pattern?

In modern distributed architectures—especially in microservices—the failure of one component can cause a ripple effect, leading to cascading failures across the system. Without a circuit breaker, a single slow or failing service might overload other parts of the system with repeated retry attempts, eventually causing widespread disruption.

Key Reasons for Using a Circuit Breaker:

• Isolation of Failures: Prevents a faulty component from affecting the entire system.
• Improved Resilience: Allows the system to recover more quickly by halting repeated, failing calls.
• Graceful Degradation: Enables fallback strategies (like returning cached data or a default response) when a service is down.
• Faster Error Detection: Quickly identifies issues in a distributed system so that remediation can begin without impacting user experience.

2. How the Circuit Breaker Pattern Works