Circuit Breaker Pattern

Kind: pattern

Layer: Correctness Core

Aliases: Circuit Breaker

Record: architecture:circuit-breaker-pattern

Severity: contextual

Scope: dependency call, service

Canonical: Ontology

A design pattern that stops calling a dependency after repeated failures and probes it again after a wait.

Listed in Architecture principles, after Timeout Pattern and before Bulkhead Pattern.

Requires

• Failure Threshold
• Fallback

Reinforces

• Fault Tolerance
• Backpressure

Enables

• Cascading Failure Prevention

Conflicts with

• Unbounded Retry
• Retry Storm

In tension with

• Availability of Degraded Dependency

Tensions

• Circuit Breaker Pattern / Availability of Degraded Dependency

Violated by

• Failure Propagation

Severity

• contextual

Category

• Error Handling / Resilience

Refactors

• Resilience

Linked from

• Anti-patterns
• Error Handling / Resilience
• Core Vocabulary
• Error Handling / Resilience
• Severity levels
• The resolutions