We regularly encounter circuit breakers; the circuit breaker is an automatic switch designed to protect entire electrical circuits from damage due to excess current load as a result of a short circuit or overload.
The same concept applies when services interact with many other services. Failure due to any (network) issue can potentially create catastrophic effects across the application, and preventing cascading impacts is the sole aim of a circuit-breaker pattern. Hence, this pattern helps subsystems to fail gracefully and also prevents complete system failure as a result of a subsystem failures:
The preceding screenshot illustrates ...
