Circuit breaking is a design pattern that helps prevent cascading failures in microservices architectures. It works by isolating failing microservices and preventing them from communicating with other microservices.
Circuit breaking works by maintaining a counter for each microservice. When a microservice fails, the counter is incremented. If the counter reaches a certain threshold, the circuit breaker is opened, and the microservice is isolated from other microservices.
When the circuit breaker is open, requests to the microservice are rejected. The circuit breaker will remain open until the counter has been reset.
Circuit breaking can be implemented using a variety of tools, including the following:
API Gateways: API gateways can be used to implement circuit breaking for all microservices that are exposed through an API.
Service Meshes: Service meshes are a more sophisticated approach to implementing circuit breaking. They can provide additional features, such as load balancing and failover.
Circuit breaking is an important pattern for microservices architectures. It can help prevent cascading failures and improve the reliability of microservices applications.