1
0
mirror of https://github.com/tmrts/go-patterns.git synced 2024-11-24 22:16:12 +03:00
go-patterns/stability/circuit-breaker.md
2016-10-20 06:43:10 +03:00

103 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown

# Circuit Breaker Pattern
Similar to electrical fuses that prevent fires when a circuit that is connected
to the electrical grid starts drawing a high amount of power which causes the
wires to heat up and combust, the circuit breaker design pattern is a fail-first
mechanism that shuts down the circuit, request/response relationship or a
service in the case of software development, to prevent bigger failures.
**Note:** The words "circuit" and "service" are used synonymously throught this
document.
## Implementation
Below is the implementation of a very simple circuit breaker to illustrate the purpose
of the circuit breaker design pattern.
### Operation Counter
`circuit.Counter` is a simple counter that records success and failure states of
a circuit along with a timestamp and calculates the consecutive number of
failures.
```go
package circuit
import (
"time"
)
type State int
const (
UnknownState State = iota
FailureState
SuccessState
)
type Counter interface {
Count(State)
ConsecutiveFailures() uint32
LastActivity() time.Time
Reset()
}
```
### Circuit Breaker
Circuit is wrapped using the `circuit.Breaker` closure that keeps an internal operation counter.
It returns a fast error if the circuit has failed consecutively more than the specified threshold.
After a while it retries the request and records it.
**Note:** Context type is used here to carry deadlines, cancelation signals, and
other request-scoped values across API boundaries and between processes.
```go
package circuit
import (
"context"
"time"
)
type Circuit func(context.Context) error
func Breaker(c Circuit, failureThreshold uint32) Circuit {
cnt := NewCounter()
return func(ctx context) error {
if cnt.ConsecutiveFailures() >= failureThreshold {
canRetry := func(cnt Counter) {
backoffLevel := Cnt.ConsecutiveFailures() - failureThreshold
// Calculates when should the circuit breaker resume propagating requests
// to the service
shouldRetryAt := cnt.LastActivity().Add(time.Seconds * 2 << backoffLevel)
return time.Now().After(shouldRetryAt)
}
if !canRetry(cnt) {
// Fails fast instead of propagating requests to the circuit since
// not enough time has passed since the last failure to retry
return ErrServiceUnavailable
}
}
// Unless the failure threshold is exceeded the wrapped service mimics the
// old behavior and the difference in behavior is seen after consecutive failures
if err := c(ctx); err != nil {
cnt.Count(FailureState)
return err
}
cnt.Count(SuccessState)
return nil
}
}
```
## Related Works
- [sony/gobreaker](https://github.com/sony/gobreaker) is a well-tested and intuitive circuit breaker implementation for real-world use cases.