Okay, so I’ve been messing around with this “circuit breaker” thing for a project, and let me tell you, it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster. I wanted to share my experience, ’cause maybe it’ll help someone else out there.
Getting Started
First, I had to figure out what I even wanted to do. I knew the basic idea – protect my app from going down when some other service it depends on is flaky. So, I started Googling. I found a lot of complicated diagrams, I do not like, just simple stuff.
Finding a Tool
I needed something to actually build this circuit breaker. I stumbled upon a few libraries, after I try some code and test, I found that it’s not difficult.
Building the Thing
Then came the fun part – actually writing some code! I won’t bore you with all the details, I started by wrapping the calls to that flaky service with my circuit breaker. The library I chose had some pretty straightforward examples, so I basically just copied those and tweaked them to fit my needs. The key was setting up the thresholds:
Failure Rate: How many times can the service fail before the circuit breaker trips?
Timeout: How long should I wait for the service to respond before I give up?
Reset Timeout: How long should the circuit breaker stay “open” (not letting any calls through) before it tries the service again?
I played around with these numbers a lot. Too sensitive, and the circuit breaker trips all the time. Too lenient, and it doesn’t really protect anything. It was a bit of a balancing act.
Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3
Of course, I couldn’t just throw this into production and hope for the best. I needed to test it! I created a little mock service that I could intentionally make fail. Then, I hammered it with requests and watched what the circuit breaker did.
It was pretty cool to see it in action. When the mock service started failing, the circuit breaker tripped, and my app kept chugging along, returning some default fallback value instead of crashing. Then, after the reset timeout, it cautiously let a few requests through to see if the service was back up. If it was still failing, bam, back to open. If it was working, hooray, back to normal operation!
What I’m using
After I tried some code, I felt good about this way:
// Simulate a remote service call with potential failures
func RemoteServiceCall() (string, error) {
// Generate a random number between 0 and 1
*(*().UnixNano())
randomNumber := *64()
// Simulate failure with a 30% probability
if randomNumber < 0.3 {
return "", *("simulated remote service failure")
return "Remote service call successful", nil
func main() {
// Create a new circuit breaker
cb := CircuitBreaker{
FailureThreshold: 3,
SuccessThreshold: 2,
Timeout: 5 *,
ResetTimeout: 10 *,
IsCurrentlyBreaking: false,
for i := 0; i < 20; i++ {
result, err := *(RemoteServiceCall)
if err != nil {
*("Call", i+1, ":", err)
} else {
*("Call", i+1, ":", result)
*(2 *)
Final Thoughts
This whole circuit breaker thing was definitely a learning experience. It’s not just about plugging in a library and calling it a day. You need to think about your specific application, tune the settings, and test, test, test. But, in the end, it’s totally worth it for the peace of mind knowing your app can handle a bit of turbulence.
