Circuit Breaker
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A pattern that prevents cascading failures by detecting when a downstream service is failing and short-circuiting requests to it. Three states: Closed (normal), Open (failing, reject immediately), Half-Open (test with limited requests). Fails fast instead of waiting for timeouts, preserving resources.
Key Properties
Related
- Bulkhead (isolates failures to limit blast radius)
- Retry with Exponential Backoff (complementary pattern)