Resilience LineLesson
Circuit breaker
When a dependency is failing, stop calling it — fail fast, give it room to recover, and check back carefully.
10 minMediumStation: Circuit breakerMembers lesson
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- Timeouts
- Retries with backoff and jitter
- Circuit breaker
- Flaky payments
- Bulkhead
What you'll be able to do
- 1Explain the closed, open and half-open states and what moves the breaker between them.
- 2Predict caller latency and load on a failing dependency with and without a breaker.
- 3Choose a fallback — cached value, default or error — for when the breaker is open.
Inside the lesson
- steps
- 7
- questions
- 7
- simulation
- 1
You guess first, then run the system and see if you were right.
More on the Resilience Line
- Failure modes and availabilityOpen9 min
- Timeouts — capping the waitMembers9 min
- Retries — with backoff and jitterMembers12 min
- Bulkhead — walls between workloadsMembers12 min
- Load shedding — turning the excess awayMembers12 min
- Backpressure — a queue that says noMembers11 min
- Rate limiting — a budget for each callerMembers12 min