Comparison
Circuit breakervsFail fast
Circuit breaker
after enough consecutive failures you stop calling the provider at all for a while, instead of queueing thousands of doomed requests behind a dead dependency.
After sustained failures or latency spikes from a provider, stop calling it for a cooling period and serve fallbacks, rather than queueing doomed requests. Your existing resilience pattern, unchanged.
Full entry →Fail fast
you reject the request immediately when you already know the dependency is down, instead of making the caller wait for a timeout.
Returning an error as soon as failure is certain rather than proceeding hopefully. It frees the caller's resources and keeps queues from filling with doomed work. It is the behaviour a circuit breaker implements, and it is why validating inputs before doing expensive work is a resilience decision, not just a tidiness one.
Full entry →