The calls between different services in a monolithic application are in-memory only. We replace the in-memory service calls with the network calls when we move from a monolithic to a distributed microservices architecture. While we get the benefits of loose coupling and the reusability of services, the application may experience cascading failures when there is latency between the services or one or more services are not available. Application failures that occur due to the latency of network calls is one of the disadvantages of microservices compared to monolithic applications.
The circuit breaker helps to reduce the aforementioned application failures and lets us build a resilient and fault-tolerant system in the case of high latency or the unavailability of key microservices. A circuit breaker in software engineering is similar to a circuit breaker in electrical...
