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Enhancing Resiliency: Implementing the Circuit Breaker Pattern for Strong Serverless Architecture on AWS

Serverless architecture is a way of building and running applications without the need to manage infrastructure. You write your code, and the cloud provider handles the rest - provisioning, scaling, and maintenance. AWS offers various serverless services, with AWS Lambda being one of the most prominent. When we talk about "serverless," it doesn't mean servers are absent. Instead, the responsibility of server maintenance shifts from the user to the provider. This shift brings forth several benefits:

  • Cost-efficiency: With serverless, you only pay for what you use. There's no idle capacity because billing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application.
  • Scalability: Serverless services automatically scale with the application's needs. As the number of requests for an application increases or decreases, the service seamlessly adjusts.
  • Reduced operational overhead: Developers can focus purely on writing code and pushing updates, rather than worrying about server upkeep.
  • Faster time to market: Without the need to manage infrastructure, development cycles are shorter, enabling more rapid deployment and iteration.

Importance of Resiliency in Serverless Architecture

As heavenly as serverless sounds, it isn't immune to failures. Resiliency is the ability of a system to handle and recover from faults, and it's vital in a serverless environment for a few reasons:

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Introduction to the Circuit Breaker Pattern

Consider that you’re running a web service that requires input and delivers it to another backend service. If the backend service is not available for some time, then what kind of fail-proof system should you implement? This is where the Circuit Breaker design pattern comes in.

Let’s think about a situation where a request goes to a middleware application and you need to call another remote backend service. If everything goes fine and smooth, the application can forward the request to the backend service and send the response back to the client. But, if the backend service was down, the request could not be completed. The next few requests from the client also try to call the backend service and fail. Here, we can use the Circuit Breaker model to manage backend errors. According to the Circuit Breaker pattern, the middleware may be in the following possible states.