CircuitBreaker is a relatively simple Ruby mixin that will wrap a call to a given service in a circuit breaker pattern. The circuit starts off "closed" meaning that all calls will go through. However, consecutive failures are recorded and after a threshold is reached, the circuit will "trip", setting the circuit into an "open" state. In an "open" state, every call to the service will fail by raising CircuitBrokenException. The circuit will remain in an "open" state until the failure timeout has elapsed. After the failure_timeout has elapsed, the circuit will go into a "half open" state and the call will go through. A failure will immediately pop the circuit open again, and a success will close the circuit and reset the failure count. require 'circuit_breaker' class TestService include CircuitBreaker def call_remote_service() ... circuit_method :call_remote_service # Optional circuit_handler do |handler| handler.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT) handler.failure_threshold = 5 handler.failure_timeout = 5 end # Optional circuit_handler_class MyCustomCircuitHandler end