Comparison
Circuit breakervsGraceful degradation
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 →Graceful degradation
the provider went down and users got a cached answer or an honest error, because you decided that in design rather than at 3am.
A designed answer to 'the model is down or over budget': cached responses, a smaller model, a non-AI code path, or an honest error. Decided in design, not improvised mid-incident.
Full entry →