Proposed Term
Circuit Breaker
Context
A stability/resilience pattern for distributed systems, introduced by Michael Nygard (Release It!, 2007) and widely popularised via Martin Fowler's bliki. A Circuit Breaker wraps a protected call and trips from CLOSED (normal) to OPEN (fail fast, don't even attempt) once a failure threshold is crossed, then probes via HALF-OPEN before closing again. It stops cascading failures and resource exhaustion when a downstream dependency is slow or down.
Fits software-architecture; relatives in the catalog: fallacies-of-distributed-computing, event-driven-architecture, site-reliability-engineering, postels-law, cap-theorem.
Sources: Michael Nygard, Release It! (2007) · https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CircuitBreaker.html
LLM Activation Test Result
Model: Claude (Opus 4.8)
Prompt: "What concepts do you associate with 'Circuit Breaker' (software)?"
Response: A resilience pattern with three states — Closed / Open / Half-Open; trips after a failure/latency threshold to fail fast and prevent cascading failures; pairs with timeouts, retries, bulkheads, fallbacks; attributed to Michael Nygard (Release It!); implemented by Hystrix, resilience4j, Polly, Istio/Envoy. Rich, consistent, strongly attributable activation.
Pre-submission Checklist
Proposed Term
Circuit Breaker
Context
A stability/resilience pattern for distributed systems, introduced by Michael Nygard (Release It!, 2007) and widely popularised via Martin Fowler's bliki. A Circuit Breaker wraps a protected call and trips from CLOSED (normal) to OPEN (fail fast, don't even attempt) once a failure threshold is crossed, then probes via HALF-OPEN before closing again. It stops cascading failures and resource exhaustion when a downstream dependency is slow or down.
Fits software-architecture; relatives in the catalog:
fallacies-of-distributed-computing,event-driven-architecture,site-reliability-engineering,postels-law,cap-theorem.Sources: Michael Nygard, Release It! (2007) · https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CircuitBreaker.html
LLM Activation Test Result
Model: Claude (Opus 4.8)
Prompt: "What concepts do you associate with 'Circuit Breaker' (software)?"
Response: A resilience pattern with three states — Closed / Open / Half-Open; trips after a failure/latency threshold to fail fast and prevent cascading failures; pairs with timeouts, retries, bulkheads, fallbacks; attributed to Michael Nygard (Release It!); implemented by Hystrix, resilience4j, Polly, Istio/Envoy. Rich, consistent, strongly attributable activation.
Pre-submission Checklist