Member-only story
Circuit Breaker in Microservices
The article provides a quick insight into the circuit breaker pattern in microservices architecture.
Overview
In the microservices world, Services interact with each other through network calls. We must accept the fact that the network or services can fail. And this can fail our service interactions. We need to handle these failures to ensure our service interactions are more reliable. One of the primitive approaches to handle it is through the Retry mechanism. But it can often lead to cascading failures which we will discuss in a while.
Circuit breaker provides a matured way to manage such failures. As the name suggests, this microservices pattern derives its inspiration from the electrical switches. When a particular microservice or resource is not responding, this pattern helps in registering the fault, switching off the communication, and restoring it back, when the service is ready to serve the requests.
This helps the microservice ecosystem in multiple ways
- It handles the service failure and exits gracefully
- It helps in reducing the overload on already stressed services
- It stops the cascading failures.
