Building a Circuit Breaker in Go

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Building a Circuit Breaker in Go

A backend service does not operate in isolation.

Even a relatively simple HTTP handler may depend on databases, caches, authentication services, payment providers, internal APIs, or other microservices.

When one of those dependencies becomes unhealthy, repeatedly calling it can make the original problem much worse.

This is where the circuit breaker pattern becomes useful.

While building Flux-Gateway, I implemented a circuit breaker in Go to explore how a gateway can detect repeated upstream failures and stop sending traffic to a dependency that is already known to be unhealthy.

Circuit Breaker on Ikwuka Okoye

Building a Circuit Breaker in Go

Building a Circuit Breaker in Go