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Circuit Breaker - CI/CD Glossary Definition

A circuit breaker trips open to stop calling a broken dependency until it heals.

A circuit breaker is a resilience pattern that stops calling a failing dependency after a threshold of errors, returning fast failures until the dependency recovers.

It has three states (closed, open, half-open); when open it fails fast instead of piling up timeouts, and it periodically tests the dependency before closing again.

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