Circuit breakers and its role
In the practical world, errors do occur. Services can timeout, become unreachable, or take longer to complete. Being a distributed system, the entire system should not go down. The circuit breaker is the solution to this problem and it is a very important component in API Gateway.
The pattern essentially works in two states. If the circuit is closed, everything is normal, the request is dispatched to the destination, the response is received. But if there are errors or timeouts the circuit is open which means that route is not available as of now, we need to go a different route or way to achieve the service request. To achieve this functionality, Netflix has open sourced their project—Hystrix. This is, however, the Node.js version of the same: https://www.npmjs.com/package/hystrixjs (it's not official from Netflix, but rather an open source project). It even has the Hystrix dashboard for monitoring purposes. According to Hystrix's library, it has the following...
