From the decorator pattern to circuit breakers in microservices

Abstract

We analyse different deployment setups for circuit breaker, a design pattern for preventing cascading failures by guarding calls towards a target service. Then, we define a unifying implementation strategy in the setting of microservices, by using the Jolie programming language. Our implementation captures all setups with a single program, by interpreting a circuit breaker as a decorator that is generic on the interface of its target service.