Circuit breaker pattern is a design pattern used in modern software systems to prevent cascading failures in distributed systems. It acts as a proxy for operations that might fail, preventing the failure from cascading to other parts of the system by monitoring for failures and preventing further calls to an unresponsive service after the failure threshold is reached.

How to use it in a sentence

• Did you hear about that outage with the payment provider? I bet their circuit breaker pattern wasn't configured properly and it took down the whole system when the database started timing out. Classic mistake, they should have been using a self-resetting breaker with a thread pool limit like Netflix does.

• I was trying to explain the circuit breaker pattern to the new dev on our team, but he kept getting it confused with a physical circuit breaker. I had to resist the urge to facepalm and just pointed him to the Martin Fowler article instead.

If you actually want to learn more...

• Microservices Guide - This guide from Martin Fowler covers various microservice architecture patterns and practices. The section on infrastructure as code and DevOps culture provides useful context for understanding where the circuit breaker pattern fits in.

• Making the Netflix API More Resilient - This Netflix Tech Blog post dives into how they use libraries like Hystrix to implement the circuit breaker pattern at scale. It's a good read if you want to see how the pattern is applied in the real world.

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