Laravel Circuit Breaker

An implementation of the Circuit Breaker pattern for Laravel Framework 5.6.

If you need an easy to use implementation of the circuit breaker pattern for your Laravel application, you're in the right place.

Note: this package is compatible with Laravel 5.6. Other/previous versions are not tested yet.

Install

You can use Composer to install the package for your project.

$ composer require francescomalatesta/laravel-circuit-breaker

Don't worry about service providers and façades: Laravel can auto discover the package without doing nothing!

Just remember to publish the config file with

php artisan vendor:publish

Usage

You will always use a single class (CircuitBreaker façade or CircuitBreakerManager class if you want to inject it) to work with this package.

Here's the methods reference:

isAvailable(string $identifier) : bool

Returns true if the $identifier service is currently available. Returns false otherwise.

Note: you can use whatever you want as identifier. I like to use the MyClass::class name when possible.

reportFailure(string $identifier) : void

Reports a failed attempt for the $identifier service. Take a look at the Configuration section below to know how attempts and failure times are managed.

reportSuccess(string $identifier) : void

Reports a successful attempt for the $identifier service. You can use it to mark a service as available and remove the "failed" status from it.

Configuration

Defaults

By editing the config/circuit_breaker.php config file contents you will able to tweak the circuit breaker in a way that is more suitable for your needs.

You have three values under the default item:

<?php

return [
    'defaults' => [
        'attempts_threshold' => 3,
        'attempts_ttl' => 1,
        'failure_ttl' => 5
    ],
    
    // ...
];

• attempts_threshold: use it to specify how many attempts you have to make before declaring a service "failed" - default: 3;
• attempts_ttl: use to specify the time (in minutes) window in which the attempts are made before declaring a service "failed" - default: 1;
• failure_ttl: once a service is marked as "failed", it will remain in this status for this number of minutes - default: 5;

For a better understanding: by default, 3 failed attempts in 1 minute will result in a "failed" service for 5 minutes.

Service Map

Tweaking the config file is cool, but what if I need to have specific ttl and attempts count for a specific service? No problem: the services option is here to help.

As you can see in the config/circuit_breaker.php config file, you also have a services item. You can specify settings for a single service here. Here's an example:

<?php

return [
    'defaults' => [
        'attempts_threshold' => 3,
        'attempts_ttl' => 1,
        'failure_ttl' => 5
    ],
    
    'services' => [
        'my_special_service_identifier' => [
            'attempts_threshold' => 2,
            'attempts_ttl' => 1,
            'failure_ttl' => 10
        ]
    ]
];

Then, when you will call CircuitBreaker::reportFailure('my_special_service_identifier'), the circuit breaker will recognize the "special" service and use specific configuration settings, TTLs and attempts count.

Protip: you can also overwrite a single settings for a service in the service array. The others are going to be merged with the defaults.

Usage Example

Let's assume we have a payments gateway integration for our application. We will call this class PaymentsGateway.

Now, let's also assume this is a third party service: sometimes it could be down for a while. However, we don't want to stop our users from buying something, so if the PaymentsGateway service is not available we want to redirect orders to a fallback service named DelayedPaymentsGateway that will simply "queue" delayed orders to process them in the future.

Let's stub this process in the following BuyArticleOperation class.

<?php

class BuyArticleOperation {
    
    /** @var PaymentsGateway */
    private $paymentsGateway;
    
    /** @var DelayedPaymentsGateway */
    private $delayedPaymentsGateway;
    
    public function process(string $orderId)
    {
       // doing stuff with my order and then...
       
       try {
           $this->paymentsGateway->attempt($orderId);
       } catch (PaymentsGatewayException $e) {
           // something went wrong, let's switch the payment
           // to the "delayed" queue system
           $this->delayedPaymentsGateway->queue($orderId);
       }
    }
}

That's great! Now we are 100% sure that our payments are going to be processed. Sometimes that's not enough.

You know, maybe the PaymentsGateway takes at least 5 seconds for a single attempt, and your application receives hundreds of orders every minute. Is it really helpful to repeatedly call the PaymentsGateway even if we "know" it's not working after the first attempt?

Well, this is how you can write your code with this circuit breaker.

<?php

use CircuitBreaker;
use My\Namespace\PaymentsGateway;
use My\Namespace\DelayedPaymentsGateway;

class BuyArticleOperation {
    
    /** @var PaymentsGateway */
    private $paymentsGateway;
    
    /** @var DelayedPaymentsGateway */
    private $delayedPaymentsGateway;
    
    public function process(string $orderId)
    {
        if(CircuitBreaker::isAvailable(PaymentsGateway::class)) {
            try {
                $this->paymentsGateway->attempt($orderId);
            } catch (PaymentsGatewayException $e) {
                // something went wrong, let's switch the payment
                // to the "delayed" queue system and report that
                // the default gateway is not working!
                $this->delayedPaymentsGateway->queue($orderId);
                CircuitBreaker::reportFailure(PaymentsGateway::class);
            }
            
            // there's nothing we can do here anymore
            return;
        }
        
        // we already know that the service is disabled, so we
        // can queue the payment process on the delayed queue
        // directly, without letting our users wait more
        $this->delayedPaymentsGateway->queue($orderId);
    }
}

Let's assume we are processing 100 orders (on different processes) in 10 seconds.

• for the first order we ask the PaymentsGateway to handle that, but something goes wrong;
• we queue the payment on the DelayedPaymentsGateway and we report a failure to the CircuitBreaker;
• the same goes for the 2nd and 3rd orders;
• after the third order is processed, the CircuitBreaker decides that after 3 attempts (and in less than 1 minute) the PaymentsGateway can be declared "failed" and we can use directly our DelayedPaymentsGateway fallback for a while (5 minutes);
• the remaining 97 orders are queued and processed successfully, without wasting time (97 * 5 = 485 processing seconds) on a service we are quite sure that will not work;

Cool, huh? :)

Testing

You can easily execute tests with

$ vendor/bin/phpunit

Coming Soon

• exponential backoff for failure TTLs;
• set TTLs less than 1 minute;
• make underlying store implementation customizable;

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING and CODE_OF_CONDUCT for details.

Security

If you discover any security related issues, please email [email protected] instead of using the issue tracker.

Credits

• Francesco Malatesta
• All Contributors

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.