What is Circuit Breaker?

Circuit breaker is a design pattern used in modern software development. It is used to detect failures and encapsulates the logic of preventing a failure from constantly recurring, during maintenance, temporary external system failure or unexpected system difficulties.

Real world example

Imagine a web application that has both local files/images and remote services that are used for fetching data. These remote services may be either healthy and responsive at times, or may become slow and unresponsive at some point of time due to variety of reasons. So if one of the remote services is slow or not responding successfully, our application will try to fetch response from the remote service using multiple threads/processes, soon all of them will hang (also called thread starvation) causing our entire web application to crash. We should be able to detect this situation and show the user an appropriate message so that he/she can explore other parts of the app unaffected by the remote service failure. Meanwhile, the other services that are working normally, should keep functioning unaffected by this failure.

Circuit Breaker States