Circuit Breaker Pattern

The Circuit Breaker pattern can prevent an application repeatedly trying to execute an operation that is likely to fail, allowing it to continue without waiting for the fault to be rectified or wasting CPU cycles while it determines that the fault is long lasting. The Circuit Breaker pattern also enables an application to detect whether the fault has been resolved. If the problem appears to have been rectified, the application can attempt to invoke the operation.

Package Details

CircuitBreaker package implements circuit breaker pattern which acts as a proxy for a particular remote service. It trips the circuit if requests are likely to be failed to remote service and untrips it after requests would be successful.

Trip function is used to open the circuit based on the circuit counters Ex. if fail/(fail+success) > 0.5, trip circuit.

Circuit remains in open state for OpenTime duration and then changes to half-open state where the service is monitored.

OpenCircuit function is used to open the circuit from half-open state based on the circuit counters. Ex. if failure > 0, trip the circuit again

UnTrip function is used to close the circuit from half-open state based on the circuit counters. Ex. if success/(fail+success) > 0.9, untrip circuit if tripped.

Circuit counters will determine the status of the service.

Usage

The struct CircuitBreaker is a state machine to prevent sending requests that are likely to fail.

1. The function NewDefaultCircuitBreaker creates a new CircuitBreaker with default settings.

func NewDefaultCircuitBreaker() *CircuitBreaker

2. The function NewCircuitBreaker creates a new CircuitBreaker with user-defined settings.

func NewCircuitBreaker(circuitName string, tripFunc, untripFunc, openFunc func(CircuitCounters) bool, openT int) *CircuitBreaker

• circuitName is the name of the CircuitBreaker for a particular service.

• currentState and currentTime defines the last state update and it's time.

• tripCircuit defines a method to trip the circuit based on the circuit counters.

Ex. 
If fail/(success+fail)>0.90 then trip the circuit. 

• openCircuit defines a method to open the circuit again from half-open to open state.

Ex. 
If fail > 0, then trip the circuit again.

• untripCircuit defines a method to untrip the circuit from half-open to close state.

Ex. 
If success requests crosses 10 then untrip the circuit

• openTime defines the time after which circuit could transition from open to half-open state

The struct CircuitCounters holds the numbers of requests and their successes/failures:

type CircuitCounters struct {
	Failure   int64
	Success   int64
	Timeout   int64
	Rejection int64
}

CircuitBreaker clears the internal Counts on the change of the state. Counts ignores the results of the requests sent before clearing.

CircuitBreaker can wrap any function to send a request:

func (cb *CircuitBreaker) Spark(req func() (interface{}, error)) (interface{}, error)

The method Spark runs the given request if CircuitBreaker accepts it. Spark returns an error instantly if CircuitBreaker rejects the request. Otherwise, Spark returns the result of the request. If a panic occurs in the request, Spark handles it as an error and causes the same panic again.

Example

var cb *breaker.CircuitBreaker

func Get(url string) ([]byte, error) {
	body, err := cb.Spark(func() (interface{}, error) {
		resp, err := http.Get(url)
		if err != nil {
			return nil, err
		}

		defer resp.Body.Close()
		body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)
		if err != nil {
			return nil, err
		}

		return body, nil
	})
	if err != nil {
		return nil, err
	}

	return body.([]byte), nil
}

License

The MIT License (MIT)