Throughout this chapter we have looked at all the aspects that apply to having a successful microservice application running in the cloud environment. We have learned about how to integrate better into a dynamically changing ecosystem, consuming remote configuration properties, registering service, and discovering and calling other services. In this recipe, we will take a look at another very important aspect of operating in a distributed, highly-volatile cloud environment circuit breakers.

The particular implementation of circuit breaker functionality which we are going to look at is Netflix Hystrix. It provides a very powerful and convenient way to annotate our service calls and handle things like remote service failures, queue backups, overloads, timeouts, and so on. By having circuit breakers in an application, developers can ensure overall application stability if a particular service endpoint becomes overloaded by requests, or experiences an outage of any kind.