How do I use a circuit breaker?

Question

I\'m looking for ways to make remote calls to services out of my control until a connect is successful. I also don\'t want to simply set a timer where an action gets executed ev

Answer 1

I've created a library called CircuitBreaker.Net that encapsulates all serving logic to safely perform calls. It's easy to use, an example could look like:

// Initialize the circuit breaker
var circuitBreaker = new CircuitBreaker(
    TaskScheduler.Default,
    maxFailures: 3,
    invocationTimeout: TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(100),
    circuitResetTimeout: TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(10000));

try
{
    // perform a potentially fragile call through the circuit breaker
    circuitBreaker.Execute(externalService.Call);
    // or its async version
    // await circuitBreaker.ExecuteAsync(externalService.CallAsync);
}
catch (CircuitBreakerOpenException)
{
    // the service is unavailable, failover here
}
catch (CircuitBreakerTimeoutException)
{
    // handle timeouts
}
catch (Exception)
{
    // handle other unexpected exceptions
}

It's available via a nuget package. You can find the sources on github.