We have looked at some patterns like timeouts and back-offs, which help protect our systems from cascading failure in the instance of an outage. However, now it's time to introduce another pattern which is complementary to this duo. Circuit breaking is all about failing fast, Michael Nygard in his book "Release It" says:
''Circuit breakers are a way to automatically degrade functionality when the system is under stress."
One such example could be our frontend example web application. It is dependent on a downstream service to provide recommendations for kitten memes that match the kitten you are looking at currently. Because this call is synchronous with the main page load, the web server will not return the data until it ...
