Introducing the Resilience4j resilience mechanisms

The circuit breaker, time limiter, and retry mechanisms are potentially useful in any synchronous communication between two software components, for example, microservices. In this chapter, we will apply these mechanisms in one place, in calls from the product-composite service to the product service. This is illustrated in the following figure:

Figure 13.1: Adding resilience capabilities to the system landscape

Note that the synchronous calls to the discovery and config servers from the other microservices are not shown in the preceding diagram (to make it easier to read).

With the Spring Cloud Hoxton release in November 2019, the Spring Cloud Circuit Breaker project was added. It provides an abstraction layer for circuit breakers. Resilience4j can be configured to be used under the hood. This project does not provide other resilience mechanisms such as retries, time limiters, bulkheads, or rate limiters in...