What does the circuit breaker pattern protect against?
Circuit breaker: wraps calls to a remote dependency and stops sending requests once failures exceed a threshold, preventing resource exhaustion and cascading outages.
2 / 5
In the open state, what does a circuit breaker do?
Open state: requests fail fast (or fall back) without hitting the troubled service, giving it time to recover and protecting the caller's threads/latency.
3 / 5
What is the purpose of the half-open state?
Half-open: after a cooldown, the breaker allows a few probe requests; success closes the circuit (resume normal), failure reopens it.
4 / 5
What typically triggers the transition from closed to open?
Tripping the breaker: when errors or timeouts cross a defined threshold within a window, the breaker opens to shed load from the failing dependency.
5 / 5
What is a common companion to a circuit breaker for graceful degradation?
Fallback: when the circuit is open, returning a cached value, default, or degraded experience keeps the system usable instead of erroring outright.