Circuit Breakers, Retries, Backoff, and Timeouts — Making Microservices Resilient
In microservice architectures, things don’t always fail cleanly. Sometimes a service goes down, but more often it just gets slow, times out, or behaves inconsistently. If we don’t handle these failures properly, a small outage in one service can quickly turn into a cascading failure across the whole system. That’s where timeouts, retries, backoff, and circuit breakers come in — four reliability patterns that make microservices resilient instead of fragile.