Circuit Breaker pattern – Overview Part 1

In our system, we have many services and it is allocated at difference servers. We have used RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) to call between services but I have a problem about failure with remote call.In a distributed environment calls to remote resource and services can fail due to transient faults such as slow network connections, timeouts or the resources being over committed or temporary unavailable. So i started to learn about “retry pattern” and i have found “Circuit breaker” as pattern give me a solution for my problem.

I have set some goals as follows

+ Learn about “Circuit breaker pattern” model architecture and how to work.
+ Looking for some libraries support this pattern.
+ Practice pattern with Java and Golang.

In the part, i focus into overview about solution and explain how to it work ?

The Circuit pattern can prevent an application from repeatedly trying to execute an operation that’s likely to fail. Allowing it to continue without waiting for the fault to be fixed and it also enables an application to detect whether the fault has been resolved. The pattern will try execute operation and update status service when the problem to have been resolved.

Circuit breaker acts as a proxy for operations that might fail. The proxy should monitor the number of recent failure that have occurred, and use this information to decide whether to allow the operation to process.

A operation that might fail have 3 type state

Close :
+ The request invoke from application is routed to the operation.
+ Reset failure counter number of requests is failed.
+ If the number of recent failure exceed a specified threshold, state Close –> Open.

Open :
+ When operation change state from Close -> Open –> start timeout timer.
+ The request invoke from application fails immediately and an exception is returned to the application.
+ When this timeout timer is expired, state Open –> Half-Open.

Half-Open :
+ A limited number of requests from the application are allowed to pass through and invoke the operation.
+ If these requests are successful, state Half-Open –> Close.

When to use this pattern 
To prevent an application from trying to invoke a remote service or access a shared resource if this operation is highly likely to fail.

When should’t use this pattern 
Handling access to local private resource, such as in memory data structure.  As a substitute for handling exceptions in the business of your applications.

The next post, i will write how to implement circuit breaker pattern with java, thank you.