Design Patterns and Best Practices in Java

The circuit-breaker pattern

This is an important pattern to implement both resilience and responsiveness in the system. Often, when a service fails in a system, it impacts other services as well. For example, service X calls service Y in the system to get or update some data. If service Y is unresponsive for some reason, our service X will make a call to service Y, wait for it to timeout, and then fail itself. Think of a scenario where service X itself is called up by another service P, and so on. We are looking at a cascading failure here, which will eventually bring down the whole system.

The circuit-breaker pattern, inspired by an electric circuit, suggests that, instead of letting the failure propagate, we should restrict the failure ...