Today it is common for our applications to have a couple of dependencies, especially when working in a microservice environment. It isn’t rare when our app reports errors, we find out that one dependency is down.
One good practice for improving our resilience is to shut down the communication with those apps that are not behaving well. Looking into other fields, we learned the concept of circuit breakers from electrical engineering, where a switch turns off when a failure happens. In Brazil, all houses have these switches that automatically shut down if our electric network becomes unstable.