Question 1

What's the difference between Circuit Breaker and Retry?

Accepted Answer

Retry repeats a failed request, usually to handle transient issues (like a brief network glitch). A circuit breaker stops sending requests to a failing service after a threshold of failures or timeouts, so your system fails fast and avoids making the problem worse. In practice, you often use both: limited retries first, then a circuit breaker to prevent endless pressure on an unhealthy dependency.

Question 2

When should I use a Circuit Breaker pattern?

Accepted Answer

Use it when your service calls another service or external API that can become slow, rate-limited, or unavailable—and those failures could cascade (thread pools fill up, queues back up, user requests time out). It’s especially useful in microservices, payment/checkout flows, third-party integrations, and any high-traffic system where failing fast and returning a fallback response is better than waiting for long timeouts.

Question 3

How much does Circuit Breaker cost?

Accepted Answer

The pattern itself is usually free if implemented in application code (e.g., open-source libraries). Costs come from the platform components you use to support it: extra monitoring/metrics/logging, service mesh or API gateway features, and potentially higher compute usage if you add sidecars (service mesh) or run additional infrastructure. The main “cost” is engineering effort to tune thresholds, timeouts, and fallback behavior safely.

Circuit Breaker

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