Daily Term: Circuit Breaker

Circuit Breaker

The Circuit Breaker pattern is used in distributed systems to prevent cascading failures when a service is unavailable. It works like an electrical circuit breaker: if a service fails repeatedly, the circuit breaker 'trips' and stops sending requests to that service for a set period, allowing it to recover. During this time, fallback logic (e.g., returning cached data) can be executed. This pattern improves system resilience but requires careful tuning of thresholds and timeouts.

Date: 2025-05-21