Circuit breaker pattern

As explained in Google Anthos in Action

A circuit breaker is a distributed-systems fault-isolation mechanism that temporarily stops requests to an failing or unavailable service.

A circuit breaker is a fault-isolation mechanism for microservices. It manages timeouts, failures, and load, stopping recurring failures from repeatedly affecting users or dependent services. section 4.5.3 section 15.8

Use circuit breaking to:

• Handle failures caused by application bugs, networks, infrastructure, maintenance, or external services. section 4.5.3 section 15.8
• Limit downtime or lost functionality when a service misses availability or performance objectives. section 4.5.3
• Redirect traffic to another microservice or external service when the original target becomes unreachable. section 4.5.3
• Apply the behavior independently of application code and programming language through a service mesh. section 4.5.3 section 4.8

Istio and Service A

A consumer invokes Istio Ingress to reach Service A, deployed in two Pods. If Service A in Pod 1 develops a load problem and becomes unreachable, circuit breaking limits the resulting disruption by managing the failing traffic path. section 4.5.3

Figure 4.9 Istio circuit breaking feature example

Use the circuit-breaking diagram to inspect the Istio traffic path and failure-isolation scenario. section 4.5.3

How Google Anthos in Action covers it

How deep it goes

Explains the purpose, failure sources, traffic redirection, and service-mesh placement, but does not detail thresholds or state transitions.

Examples

Uses an Istio Ingress request to Service A, two Pods, an unreachable Pod, and alternate-service traffic redirection.

What it assumes

Assumes microservices, Kubernetes Pods, service-to-service connectivity, and basic Istio or Anthos Service Mesh concepts.

What you can do after

Operate circuit breaking through Anthos Service Mesh to isolate failing service paths and limit user-visible disruption.

How it connects

Connects circuit breaking with microservices, service mesh, Istio, Envoy, traffic routing, timeouts, fault injection, SLAs, and SLOs.

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Also explained in

• 

  liveBookmanning.com
  The Art of CodeA circuit breaker is a fault-tolerance pattern that temporarily stops calls to an failing dependency after repeated failures and later permits limited recovery attempts.
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  gRPC Microservices in GoA circuit breaker is a fault-tolerance pattern that temporarily stops calls to a failing dependency to prevent cascading failures.
• 

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  Python Concurrency with asyncioA circuit breaker pattern is a fault-tolerance pattern that stops sending requests to a failing or slow service and resumes requests after a configured reset condition.
• 

  liveBookmanning.com
  Bootstrapping Microservices, Second Edition: With Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, and TerraformA circuit breaker is a resilience pattern that stops requests to a failing upstream service and resumes them after checking that the service has recovered.
• 

  liveBookmanning.com
  Secure APIsA circuit breaker pattern prevents repeated calls to an unhealthy dependency and returns a controlled result when that dependency fails or responds unexpectedly.

Compare how 6 books explain circuit breaker pattern →

Related concepts

• open stateuses · An open state is a circuit-breaker state in which calls to a failing dependency are rejected or fail immediately without being attempted.
• half-open stateuses · A half-open state is a circuit-breaker state that permits a limited number of requests to test whether a previously failing dependency has recovered.
• cascading failureaddresses · A cascading failure is a chain reaction in which the failure or degradation of one component propagates through dependencies and causes further failures or instability.
• closed statehas part · The closed state is a circuit-breaker state in which requests pass normally to a dependency considered healthy.

This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Google Anthos in Action. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.