BackendDevOps/CloudHigh signal
Circuit Breaker
A pattern that stops a service from repeatedly calling another service that's already failing, temporarily 'breaking the circuit' to prevent one failure from cascading into a larger outage.
Think of it like
Like an electrical circuit breaker that trips and cuts power before an overloaded wire starts a fire, instead of letting the overload keep going.
Junior or senior?
Junior sounds like
Designs for the happy path and hasn't thought about cascading failure.
Senior sounds like
Can describe a time a circuit breaker (or the lack of one) affected a real incident.
Ask them
“Tell me about a time a circuit breaker (or the lack of one) affected an incident on your team.”