Mastering Microservices with Java - Third Edition

Circuit breaker

In general terms, a circuit breaker is:

An automatic device for stopping the flow of current in an electrical circuit, as a safety measure.

The same concept is used for microservice development, known as the circuit breaker design pattern. It tracks the availability of external services such as Eureka Server, API services such as restaurant-service, and so on, and prevents service consumers from performing any action on any service that is not available.

It is another important aspect of microservice architecture, a safety measure (a failsafe mechanism) for when the service does not respond to a call made by the service consumer—a circuit breaker.

We'll use Netflix Hystrix as a circuit breaker. It calls the internal fallback ...