DevOps Glossary

Circuit Breaker is a resilience pattern that temporarily pauses calls to an unhealthy dependency, such as an API, database, queue, or microservice, when errors or timeouts pass a set threshold. It helps protect your application from cascading failures by failing fast, preserving resources, and giving the dependency time to recover. A typical circuit breaker moves between closed, open, and half-open states: it allows calls while healthy, blocks calls during failure, then sends a small number of test requests before fully restoring traffic.