Michael Nygard’s book Release It! (Pragmatic Programmers) shows how the same idea can work wonders as a protection mechanism for our software. Consider the story I shared just a moment ago. The downstream legacy ad application was responding very slowly, before eventually returning an error. Even if we’d got the timeouts right, we’d be waiting a long time before we got the error. And then we’d try it again the next time a request came in, and wait. It’s bad enough that the downstream service is malfunctioning, but it’s making us go slow too. With a circuit breaker, after a certain number of
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Circuit Breaker
