Circuit breaker design pattern: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 10:00, 9 October 2024

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{{Short description|Software development pattern}}

{{Multiple issues|{{cleanup rewrite|date=September 2013}}

{{howtohow-to|date=September 2013}}}}

'''Circuit breaker''' is a [[Design pattern (computer science)|design pattern]] used in [[software development]]. It is used to detect failures and encapsulates the logic of preventing a failure from constantly recurring, during maintenance, temporary external system failure or unexpected system difficulties. Circuit breaker pattern prevents [[Cascadingcascading failure|cascading failures]]s particularly in [[Distributed computing|distributed systems]].<ref>{{Cite book |title=Machine Learning in Microservices Productionizing Microservices Architecture for Machine Learning Solutions |publisher=Packt Publishing |year=2023 |isbn=9781804612149}}</ref>

According to Marc Brooker, circuit breakers can misinterpret a partial failure as total system failure and inadvertently bring down the entire system. In particular, sharded systems and cell-based architectures are vulnerable to this issue. A workaround is that the server indicates to the client which specific part is overloaded and the client uses a corresponding mini circuit breaker. However, this workaround can be complex and expensive. <ref>{{Cite book |title=Understanding DistirbutedDistributed Systems |isbn=9781838430214}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=Will circuit breakers solve my problems? |url=https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/02/16/circuit-breakers.html}}</ref>

Circuit breaker pattern should be used along with other patterns such as retry, fallback and timeout pattern. This helps the system to be more [[Software fault tolerance|fault tolerant]].<ref>{{Cite book |title=Kubernetes Native Microservices with Quarkus and MicroProfile |publisher=Manning |year=2022 |isbn=9781638357155}}</ref>

==Common uses==