How to use a circuit breaker in Node.js

Building scalable and resilient applications is crucial for businesses, and implementing a circuit breaker is an effective strategy to enhance application reliability, especially in the face of unexpected traffic surges or external API failures. A circuit breaker, inspired by electrical circuits, prevents continuous failed requests by managing requests in three states: Closed, Open, and HalfOpen, thereby conserving resources and maintaining service levels. In a Node.js environment, a custom circuit breaker can be created, or developers can use Opossum, a Node.js library that simplifies the implementation by managing execution states and providing configurable options such as timeout and error thresholds. Using circuit breakers helps in avoiding cascading failures, handling API maintenance or rate limits, and optimizing resource allocation for high-load operations.