Circuit Breakers & Bulkheads
Fail fast, isolate damage, and recover gracefully. Lesson 7 of Level 9: Microservices. Based on Building Microservices, DDD, Software Architecture and DDIA.
Level 9 · Microservices · Lesson 7 of 13
Fail fast, isolate damage, and recover gracefully.
Continue learning
- Timeouts, Retries & Retry Storms — Previous lesson
- Idempotency: Making Retries Safe — Next lesson
- Level 9: Microservices — Back to the level
Try it hands-on
- Circuit Breaker States — Degrade a dependency and watch the breaker trip from closed to open to half-open, with and without fallbacks.
- Microservice Failure Cascade — Kill Payment, Inventory or Notification in a checkout chain and add timeouts, retries, breakers, async events and sagas.
- Microservices Lab — Failures, retries, circuit breakers, sagas and idempotency.
All lessons in Microservices
- Why Microservices Exist — and When Not to Use Them
- Finding Service Boundaries & Splitting the Monolith
- Database per Service & Data Ownership
- Synchronous vs Asynchronous Communication
- API Gateways, BFFs & Service Discovery
- Timeouts, Retries & Retry Storms
- Circuit Breakers & Bulkheads
- Idempotency: Making Retries Safe
- Distributed Transactions: 2PC, Sagas & the Outbox
- Observability: Logs, Metrics, Traces & SLOs
- Deployment: Containers, Kubernetes, Canary & Feature Flags
- Testing Microservices & Consumer-Driven Contracts
- Teams, Ownership & Conway’s Law