Integrating Circuit Breakers with Spring Boot: A Complete Guide

In today’s world of distributed systems and microservices architecture, service failures are inevitable. One critical component to make your application resilient against such failures is the Circuit Breaker pattern. This post will guide you through the integration of Circuit Breakers with Spring Boot using Resilience4j, a lightweight and easy-to-use library. Additionally, we’ll explore how to create a custom annotation for a cleaner and more reusable implementation.

What is a Circuit Breaker?

A Circuit Breaker is a design pattern used to prevent cascading failures in a distributed system by:

1. Monitoring the health of a service.
2. Allowing limited retries during failures.
3. Temporarily stopping requests to a failing service.
4. Automatically recovering when the service becomes healthy again.

Why Use Resilience4j with Spring Boot?

• Lightweight: Focuses on functional programming and has low overhead.
• Modular: Supports Circuit Breakers, Rate Limiters, Bulkheads, and more.
• Integration Ready: Fits seamlessly with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.

Setup and Configuration

Step 1: Add Dependencies