Protect your users with Circuit Breakers

The inevitability of failures is the bane of scaling any modern web service and can cause serious pain for end users! Lucky for us, there are techniques that can help protect your product handle failures in subsystems gracefully. This talk will dive into one of these in depth, the Circuit Breaker pattern, and explore the options it gives us for keeping our users safe.

We will be focusing on several real-world problems and how they can be addressed by circuit breakers. You should expect to leave the talk with details on simple circuit breakers as well as understanding how they can be adapted for more complex situations. We’ll also discuss some options for how to implement your circuit breaker in readable python.

Contrived FAQ time!

I don’t know what Circuit Breakers are, should I come? Definitely! We’re going to start from scratch and work our way up. Only requirement is basic familiarity with backend services receiving and making HTTP requests.

I totally know what Circuit Breakers are, should I come? Definitely! After the intro, the main meat of the talk will be working through a series of more advanced situations and talking about how we can alter the basic circuit breaker setup to address them.

I want real-world advice, not made up hypotheticals! Well that’s not really a question, but you’ll be happy to know that the examples we’ll discuss come straight from my experience at Yelp. They should be very realistic and broadly applicable.