Authors: George Asfour, Backend Engineer, and Travis Turner, Tech EditorTopics: Open Source, Ruby
Take a deep dive into what circuit breakers are, why you might need them, and the options you have in Ruby.
It's 4 AM. Your team calls …the app is down. Time to wake up, grab a coffee, and investigate. You uncover a trail of fails: the payment processor you integrate with started responding slowly → your checkout requests began timing out → users started frantically refreshing → and now your entire Rails app is unresponsive. This is a cascading failure, something more common than you might think. In this post, we'll explore circuit breakers in Ruby, how they can prevent these cascading failures, and share a battle-tested open source Ruby solution so you can focus less on circuit breaker configs and more on business logic!
