circuit breaker

Definitions

1. A design pattern that prevents an application from repeatedly trying to execute an operation that is likely to fail, by 'tripping' after a threshold of failures and short-circuiting subsequent calls for a cooldown period. Named after electrical circuit breakers, this pattern prevents cascade failures in distributed systems. The breaker periodically allows a test request through to check if the downstream service has recovered.

   In plain English: An automatic safety switch that stops your app from repeatedly calling a broken service, giving it time to recover instead of making things worse.

   Example: The circuit breaker tripped after five consecutive timeouts to the payment service, so checkout showed 'temporarily unavailable' instead of hanging for 30 seconds.

Related Terms

• Graceful Degradation
• Circuit Breaker
• Bulkhead Pattern
• Retry Storm
• MVVM
• Platform Abstraction
• Core Service