A circuit breaker is a design pattern used in microservice architecture to improve the resilience and fault tolerance of the system. In a microservice architecture, multiple services work together to deliver a business function. When a service is not available, the downstream services depending on it may start to fail as well, leading to a cascading failure. A circuit breaker helps prevent cascading failures by monitoring the status of the dependent services. If a dependent service is not responding, the circuit breaker trips and redirects the traffic to a fallback mechanism, such as a cache or a default response. The circuit breaker periodically attempts to reconnect to the dependent service, and once it's available, it resumes directing traffic to it. The circuit breaker pattern helps prevent failures from spreading across the system, improves the availability of the overall system, and can help reduce the load on dependent services.
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