Circuit Breaker
Noun · Development · Origin: 2007
Definitions
A design pattern that prevents an application from repeatedly trying to execute an operation that's likely to fail, giving the failing service time to recover. Like an electrical circuit breaker: when too many failures occur, the circuit 'opens' and fast-fails requests.
In plain English: A safety mechanism that stops your app from repeatedly calling a broken service — if a service is down, stop trying for a while instead of overwhelming it with failed requests.
The pattern has three states: Closed (normal operation, requests pass through), Open (failures exceeded threshold, requests fail immediately), and Half-Open (after a timeout, allow a few test requests to check if the downstream service has recovered).
Example: 'The circuit breaker opened after 10 consecutive timeouts from the payment service. All checkout requests got a friendly 'try again in a minute' instead of hanging for 30 seconds.'
Source: state machine detail
Related Terms
- Load Balancer
- Chaos Engineering
- Graceful Degradation
- error budget
- blast radius
- circuit breaker
- Bulkhead Pattern
- Retry Storm
- Saga Pattern
- Backoff
- Leader Election
- Write-Ahead Log
- Init Container
- Contract Testing
- Dead Letter Queue
- Load Shedding
- Finite State Machine
- Slowly Changing Dimension
- Medallion Architecture
- Windowing
- Watermark
- API Gateway Pattern
- Long Polling
- Partial Application
- Feature Toggle
- CTE
- Aggregate
- Anti-Corruption Layer
- Sliding Window
- Backpressure
- GraphQL Fragment
- Inbox Pattern
- API Composition
- Regex
- Retry Policy