breaker

Simple, robust circuit breaker for java; and nothing else.

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Concept

The circuit breaker pattern is used to create fail-fast systems. Any time a component in the flow of the system (the circuit) is broken, that system typically responds slowly to users since it has to wait for timeouts to confirm failure of the broken component. With circuit breakers, when the component breaks the breaker trips and any subsequent attempts to access the broken component instantly return with an error. After some timeout, the breaker attempts to reset itself by detecting if the component is still broken. If it is then the breaker trips again and continues to fail fast, but if not the breaker resets and the system can be used again as normal.

Usage

Creating a Breaker

A Breaker with the default configuration can be created with the default constructor.

Breaker breaker = new Breaker();

The default configuration is loaded from files used by the typesafe config library. Read more about the config library to learn how to change the defaults. The defaults can also be overridden using the constructor or any of the setter methods.

Executing operations

To do an operation through the breaker just use the execute method.

try{
    breaker.execute(() -> readValueFromDatabase());
}catch(CircuitBreakerClosedException e){
    System.err.println("breaker closed, database must be down");
}catch(Exception e){
    System.err.println("looks like trouble");
}

The breaker will automatically detect any exceptions thrown by readValueFromDatabase as a failure and re-throw them, or throw CircuitBreakerClosedException as a fail fast error.

The single parameter version of execute throws Exception, because Callable throws Exception. Although this means you can throw checked exceptions inside your lambda, it is pretty annoying because it requires such a broad catch block. The breaker library provides two more versions of execute to mitigate this. First, execute(Callable, boolean) returns an Optional and throws no exceptions. If your Callable throws any exceptions (or if the boolean parameter is false and the Callable returns null) the breaker will detect a failure and return Optional.empty. With this method our code would look like this

Optional result = breaker.execute(() -> readValueFromDatabase(), false);
result.ifPresent(r -> System.out.println(result));

Second, the execute(Callable, Class) method will only throw CircuitBreakerClosedException or an instance of the class parameter. For instance, our earlier code becomes

try{
    breaker.execute(() -> readValueFromDatabase(), MyDatabaseException.class);
}catch(CircuitBreakerClosedException e){
    System.err.println("breaker closed, database must be down");
}catch(MyDatabaseException e){
    System.err.println("looks like trouble");
}

much better.

Event handlers

The breaker library allows you to register event handlers for when the circuit breaker trips or resets. This is especially useful for raising alarms and health monitoring. The event handlers are Consumers of the Instant the event occurs. Set these with onReset and onTrip.

Manually manipulating the Breaker

Normally the Breaker will use exceptions to detect failures, trip and reset all on its own. However, sometimes you need to indicate a failure some way aside from an exception. For this you can use the fail method. For example

breaker.execute(() -> {
    boolean success = tryOperation();
    if(!success)
        breaker.fail();
    return success;
});

Other times, you might recieve information during an operation which would make you want to trip the breaker immediately instead of waiting to reach the failure threshold. For this you can use the trip method. For example

breaker.execute(() -> {
    Response response = httpRequest();
    if(response.status() == 503)
        breaker.trip();
    else return response;
}, false);

When and where to use a Breaker

A circuit breaker should be used any time an operation takes place and it cannot be immediately determined if the operation has succeded for failed.

Baked into a library

The easiest place to use a circuit breaker is inside something like a client library for a web service. In this case you should have one static Breaker instance shared between each instance of your client. You will likely want to use the breaker to wrap all remote service calls or any other place where an operation has a chance of failure that will not be immediately reported.

Stand alone

To get the optimal benefit out of using circuit breakers, you will need to identify groups of parts of your system which will fail together. These will be things which have a bi-directional dependency on each other. These groups will each share a Breaker instance. Be careful not to share an instance between components that have a unidirectional or no dependence on each other as this will cause you to lose the usage of components which are in fact fully functional.