What is the role of circuit breakers in microservices architecture?

Microservices Architecture Questions



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What is the role of circuit breakers in microservices architecture?

The role of circuit breakers in microservices architecture is to prevent cascading failures and improve the overall resilience of the system. Circuit breakers monitor the communication between microservices and when a failure or timeout occurs, they open the circuit and stop further requests from being sent to the failing service. This allows the failing service to recover and prevents the failure from spreading to other services. Circuit breakers also provide fallback mechanisms, allowing alternative actions to be taken when a service is unavailable, such as returning cached data or providing default responses.