Circuit Breakers and Graceful Degradation
Learn how circuit breakers prevent cascading failures and how graceful degradation keeps a system useful even when dependencies fail.
The Cascading Failure Problem
In a system of dependent services, one slow service can drag down everything that calls it. Threads pile up waiting, queues fill, and the failure cascades across the whole system.
High availability means containing failures, not just preventing them.
What a Circuit Breaker Does
A circuit breaker wraps calls to a dependency. When failures cross a threshold, it opens and fails fast instead of waiting on a dead service.
- Stops wasting threads on doomed calls
- Gives the failing service time to recover
All lessons in this course
- Redundancy and Failover Mechanisms
- Disaster Recovery Planning
- Monitoring, Alerting, and Logging
- Circuit Breakers and Graceful Degradation