Cianplan

Level 3: Distributed systems · L3.2 Timeouts, retries, idempotency, rate limiting, circuit breakers

Circuit breakers, load shedding and backpressure

Stop cascading failures when a dependency is slow.

13 min · Pro

What you take away

  • A circuit breaker fails fast once a dependency is clearly failing, protecting the caller's resources and the callee's recovery.

And 3 more inside the class, in Pro.

How the class is laid out

  1. The problem
  2. The simple version
  3. The breaker
  4. Shedding and backpressure
  5. Timeouts
  6. Retries
  7. Idempotency
  8. Rate limiting
  9. Breakers and shedding
  10. Check your understanding