Jump to content

Circuit breaker design pattern

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 76.164.242.99 (talk) at 08:54, 20 March 2025. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Circuit Breaker is a design pattern commonly used in software development to improve system resilience and fault tolerance. Circuit breaker pattern can prevent cascading failures particularly in distributed systems.[1] In distributed systems, the Circuit Breaker pattern can be used to monitor service health and can detect failures dynamically. Unlike timeout-based methods, which can lead to delayed error responses or the premature failure of healthy requests, the Circuit Breaker pattern can proactively identify unresponsive services and can prevent repeated attempts. This approach can enhance the user experience. [2]

The circuit breaker pattern can be used in conjunction with other patterns, such as retry, fallback, and timeout, to enhance fault tolerance in systems. [3]

Challenges

According to Marc Brooker, circuit breakers can misinterpret a partial failure as total system failure and inadvertently bring down the entire system. In particular, sharded systems and cell-based architectures are vulnerable to this issue. A workaround is that the server indicates to the client which specific part is overloaded and the client uses a corresponding mini circuit breaker. However, this workaround can be complex and expensive.[4][5]

References

  1. ^ Machine Learning in Microservices Productionizing Microservices Architecture for Machine Learning Solutions. Packt Publishing. 2023. ISBN 9781804612149.
  2. ^ Richards, Mark. Microservices AntiPatterns and Pitfalls. O'Reilly.
  3. ^ Kubernetes Native Microservices with Quarkus and MicroProfile. Manning. 2022. ISBN 9781638357155.
  4. ^ Understanding Distributed Systems. ISBN 9781838430214.
  5. ^ "Will circuit breakers solve my problems?".