Circuit Breaker
A pattern that stops calling a failing service after repeated failures, preventing cascade failures. Like an electrical circuit breaker that cuts power to prevent fires.
What is Circuit Breaker?
A pattern that stops calling a failing service after repeated failures, preventing cascade failures. Like an electrical circuit breaker that cuts power to prevent fires.
Circuit Breaker is a intermediate-level concept that sits in the Microservices Architecture area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Circuit Breaker" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
Learn Circuit Breaker in depth
Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
Open the Circuit Breaker lessonRelated lessons
Lessons that touch on Circuit Breaker as part of a larger topic.
Design an API Gateway
Design an API gateway - request routing, authentication, rate limiting, circuit breaker, load balancing, and observability
capstone · capstone
Circuit Breaker for Resilience
Stop calling failing services to prevent cascade failures, open, closed, and half-open states
advanced · reliability resilience
Circuit Breaker Pattern
Prevent cascading failures in distributed systems by failing fast when a downstream service is unhealthy
intermediate · microservices architecture
See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
Bulkhead
A pattern that isolates different parts of a system so a failure in one part doesn't sink the whole ship. Named after the compartments in a ship's hull.
Retry
Automatically re-attempting a failed operation, usually with exponential backoff. Essential for handling transient failures in distributed systems.
Microservices
An architecture where an application is split into small, independent services that communicate over the network. Each service owns its own data and can be deployed separately.