Circuit Breakers

A circuit breaker is a piece of code that wraps every call to another service, counts how many of them fail, and stops making those calls for a while once failures pass a limit. While it is stopping calls, every caller receives an error immediately, without waiting for the service at all. After a pause, the breaker allows one call to test whether the service has recovered.

The name comes from the electrical device that cuts a circuit when too much current flows. The software version stops sending requests to a service that is failing, and it does so for two reasons