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Circuit Breaker Pattern in AWS
Govardhana M K
September 13, 2025
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🧠 DEEP DIVE USE CASE
Circuit Breaker Pattern in AWS
Imagine you are running a serverless application on AWS. A client request flows through Service A → Service B → Service C, each backed by AWS Lambda.
All services are healthy, requests are processed quickly, and the client receives responses on time.
Everything works fine until Service C starts failing, maybe due to a downstream database timeout or a sudden surge in load.
Service B keeps making calls, but every call is slow or unsuccessful. Latency builds up here first.
As Service C continues to fail, Service B also becomes unhealthy. It gets stuck waiting for responses, wasting Lambda invocations and compute time. What started as a single service problem is now spreading upstream.
Service A is now impacted because it depends on Service B. Client requests wait longer, only to eventually time out. The client experiences errors, and what began as a failure in one service has now cascaded through the entire system.
This is not exceptional, especially with microservices designs spread all over the place where one weak link can easily ripple back and break the chain.
The circuit breaker pattern stops cascading failures by introducing a feedback loop.
What is the Circuit Breaker Pattern?
A resilience design pattern that prevents a system from endlessly trying to call a failing service.
Circuit Breaker Workflow
It works similar to an electrical circuit breaker. When the downstream system is healthy, calls flow normally. When it becomes unhealthy and errors reach a threshold, the breaker trips open to stop more calls from being sent.
Key Terms
The circuit breaker operates in three states:
Closed: The normal state where requests flow freely. Failures are tracked and as long as they stay below a threshold, traffic continues as usual.
Open: When failures cross the threshold, the circuit opens. New requests are blocked immediately and return errors quickly instead of waiting on timeouts.
Half Open: After a cooldown period, a few trial requests are allowed. If they succeed the circuit closes again. If they fail the circuit remains open until the next check.
Implementation Architecture
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