Circuit Breaker - CI/CD Glossary Definition
A circuit breaker halts calls to a failing dependency after repeated errors to prevent cascading failure.
A circuit breaker is a resilience pattern that stops calling a failing dependency after a threshold of errors, returning fast failures until it recovers. It prevents cascading failures across services.
Like an electrical breaker, it "opens" after too many failures, short-circuiting further calls, then "half-opens" to test recovery. Tests in CI simulate downstream failures to verify the breaker trips.
States
Closed passes traffic, open rejects it fast, and half-open lets a trial request through to check whether the dependency has recovered.
Related guides
Rate Limiting - CI/CD Glossary DefinitionRate Limiting: Rate limiting restricts how many requests a client can make in a time window, protecting a ser…
Idempotent Request - CI/CD Glossary DefinitionIdempotent Request: An idempotent request produces the same result whether sent once or many times, so retrie…
Graceful Shutdown - CI/CD Glossary DefinitionGraceful Shutdown: Graceful shutdown is stopping a service by finishing in-flight requests and closing connec…