Software Design

Circuit Breaker Pattern in Microservices

State Diagrams · made in Skemio

State diagram showing Circuit Breaker transitions: Initial to Closed, Closed to Open on error threshold met, Open to Half-Open after timeout, and Half-Open back to Closed on success or Open on failure.
State diagram showing Circuit Breaker transitions: Initial to Closed, Closed to Open on error threshold met, Open to Half-Open after timeout, and Half-Open back to Closed on success or Open on failure.
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What it shows

  • Closed passes traffic normally until failures hit an error threshold.
  • Open trips immediately, fast-failing traffic without downstream calls.
  • Half-Open probes recovery with canary calls before full re-opening.

The takeaway

Failing fast preserves system threads and protects degraded dependencies from overload.

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