Resiliency in Microservices: A Guide to Circuit Breaker Pattern

The Circuit Breaker pattern with fallback is a strategy used in microservices architecture to boost system resilience. Picture it as a safety net for your services. When a critical service, like a product catalog, starts acting up due to high traffic or errors, the circuit breaker kicks in and temporarily redirects the system to a backup plan — the fallback mechanism. This can be displaying cached data or a simple message to users, preventing the entire system from going haywire. The circuit breaker periodically checks if the troubled service is back on track, automatically switching back to normal operations when it’s ready. Essentially, it’s a smart way to handle hiccups in microservices, ensuring smoother user experiences even when certain services hit a rough patch

Scenario and Problem Explanation:

In a distributed environment, applications often make calls to remote resources or services. These calls may encounter faults, which can be transient or long-lasting. The Retry pattern is commonly used for transient faults, allowing the application to retry the operation until it succeeds. However, there are situations where continuous retries are not effective, and a more strategic approach is needed.