The Circuit Breaker
One of the coolest patterns discussed in Release It is the Circuit Breaker pattern. The pattern enables you to wrap dangerous or risky operations with a component that avoids calling the real operation when a certain failure rate has been reached. For instance, suppose you need to call an external web service in your application. The external web service is known to be flaky at times which causes each call to it to hang for a while before it eventually fails. Now, if that service is in a bad state, your application threads will waste a lot of time waiting on the failure. Wouldn’t it be better if your application could detect when the service is in a bad shape and in that case, immediately throw an exception when the service is called? As the author of Release It often says: it’s better to fail fast if you know something’s wrong.
This is something I need to implement in the EPP connection multiplexer at work because certain registries are, em, somewhat unreliable…