Talos Laws

The laws are inspired from various sources:

  • […]timeouts at the interfaces between remote systems to prevent the failure of a single component from bringing down all components[…]more
  • […] it is essential to involve the system’s stakeholders when deciding how to handle calls made when the circuit is open. Michael T. Nygard. Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers). Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2007.
  • Circuit breakers are a valuable place for monitoring. Any change in breaker state should be logged and breakers should reveal details of their state for deeper monitoring. Martin Fowler

Taking it from there we can now derive (in the order given) the following laws.

  • A circuit breaker must enforce a timeout.
  • Upon catching a failure in the circuit breaker we need to have a user defined fallback to execute.
  • Circuit breakers must expose their state for monitoring purposes.

A laws library is provided to be able to:

  • Test these laws uniformly in the provided implementations (Based on Monix-catnip and Akka).
  • Test user implementations of the TalosCircuitBreaker.
libraryDependencies += "org.vaslabs.talos" %% "taloslaws" % "2.1.0"

Navigate the laws section to find more.