Record success and failure signals for the protected dependency.
Reliability & Delivery · Fault Handling
Circuit Breaker
Track failures and temporarily stop calls to an unhealthy dependency. Closed, open and half-open states let the system fail fast while still testing whether the dependency has recovered.
How can callers stop wasting time and capacity on a dependency that is likely to keep failing?GateSift summary based on Microsoft Azure Architecture Center guidance. The wording, visualization, Azure mapping and analyzer context are original GateSift material.
Original GateSift visualization
How Circuit Breaker works
Failure history determines whether a dependency call proceeds, fails immediately or probes for recovery.
Dependency call
Circuit state
Call allowed
Fail fast
Open the circuit when the failure threshold is exceeded and reject calls without waiting for timeouts.
Use a controlled half-open probe to close the circuit only after the dependency recovers.
What this pattern helps you decide
Track failures and temporarily stop calls to an unhealthy dependency. Closed, open and half-open states let the system fail fast while still testing whether the dependency has recovered.
Which failure mode or capacity limit is this pattern intended to contain?
Which thresholds, deadlines, state or compensation data must remain durable?
How will operators know the pattern activated and whether recovery succeeded?
Where you may see it
- Application resilience libraries such as Polly
- API gateway or service-mesh dependency protection
- Fail-fast wrappers around remote service calls
How the analyzers can surface it
- Retry loops without a long-failure protection strategy
- Backend failover or health-probe behavior in APIM
- Repeated connector failures without a cooldown or alternate path
Pattern detection is contextual. GateSift should present these as architectural signals, not claim a pattern is implemented solely because one policy statement or adapter exists.
Source guidance and attribution
This page links to Microsoft Azure Architecture Center for the source architecture guidance. GateSift summaries, diagrams, Azure examples and analyzer signals are original. No endorsement by Microsoft is implied.