Circuit Breaker Pattern Can Prevent Cascading Failures in Microservices

In distributed systems, failed network calls are inevitable and can trigger cascading failures that bring down entire infrastructures. When one service hangs due to high latency, dependent services exhaust their threads or memory waiting for responses, potentially causing a full outage. The Circuit Breaker pattern addresses this by wrapping network-bound calls and monitoring for failures across three states: Closed (normal operation), Open (fast-failing requests), and Half-Open (testing recovery). Inspired by electrical circuit breakers, the software equivalent cuts off calls to a failing service after a defined failure threshold is crossed. A basic implementation in Go can be achieved in roughly 50 lines, automatically resetting after a cooldown period to restore normal traffic flow.