Circuit Breaker Pattern in Go stops cascading failures

Short summary

A practical guide to the circuit breaker pattern in Go, covering the three-state machine (closed, open, half-open) and where breakers belong around outbound calls like HTTP APIs and LLM gateways. The article distinguishes circuit breakers from timeouts, retries, rate limiters, and bulkheads, explaining how each solves a different failure problem. It emphasizes that slow dependencies are often worse than hard failures because they consume resources silently.

• •Circuit breaker uses closed/open/half-open states to fail fast on unhealthy dependencies
• •Breakers are distinct from timeouts, retries, rate limiters, and bulkheads—each solves a different problem
• •Slow dependencies are the worst case: they drain goroutines, sockets, and connections without triggering hard failures

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