implement-circuit-breaker

A circuit breaker prevents cascading failures by wrapping external API calls with a state machine that stops traffic when failure thresholds are exceeded. It safeguards dependencies like payment or data fetcher services from latency spikes and outages by failing fast.

A circuit breaker state machine transitions between closed, open, and half-open states to manage fault tolerance. It uses configurable timeouts, failure thresholds, and recovery intervals to test dependency health before allowing full traffic to resume.

Configure circuit breaker thresholds and timeouts by setting failure limits, max in-flight requests, and recovery intervals to match your HTTP client dependency behavior. This tailors the state machine to trigger fast failure during latency spikes.

Yes, you can implement graceful degradation using a pluggable fallback strategy when a dependency is unhealthy. This allows your service to maintain a responsive UX during partial outages by returning fallback data instead of errors.

The best way to add observability is configuring the circuit breaker to emit metrics and logs during state transitions. This provides visibility into fault tolerance behavior across distributed systems and helps track dependency health.