Circuit Breaker in 1 diagram and 167 words
Explained as simply as possible… but not simpler.
A design pattern that prevents a system from repeatedly trying to perform an operation that's likely to fail, helping it recover gracefully.
Downstream services (like databases or APIs) can become slow or unavailable. Continuously retrying failed requests can overwhelm these services and spread failure. The circuit breaker stops this cascade by "breaking" the flow temporarily when too many failures occur.
Use it when calling unreliable external services or when you want to contain failures and keep your system responsive under partial outages.
You need to know
States: Closed, Open, Half-Open – The circuit starts closed (calls pass through). After failures exceed a threshold, it goes open (calls are blocked). After a timeout, it goes half-open to test if recovery is possible.
Prevents cascading failure – By cutting off repeated failed calls, it reduces load on failing systems and protects upstream services.
Needs monitoring and tuning – Set failure thresholds, timeout durations, and retry intervals carefully to avoid false positives or delayed recovery.
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