Implementación del Patrón Circuit Breaker en Microservicios con Spring Boot para evitar fallos en cascada a través de una simulación de consumo de servicios externos

Abstract

This paper explores the issue of cascading failures in microservices based architectures, particularly those originating from external dependencies. This anomaly can lead to significant degradations in the availability and performance of distributed systems, consequently impacting operational continuity and end-user experience. As a solution, the Circuit Breaker resilience pattern is implemented utilizing the Spring Boot framework and the Resilience4j library. The study is conducted within a financial sector use case, involving the retrieval of electricity bill values via an external API. To analyze system behavior, three experimental scenarios are defined: normal operation, degradation without resilience mechanisms, and the application of the Circuit Breaker pattern. The methodology integrates load testing with controlled fault injection using k6 and Toxiproxy, coupled with detailed real-time metric monitoring employing Prometheus and Grafana. This work provides technical and methodological evidence supporting the adoption of resilience patterns in microservices architectures and serves as a practical guide for software architects interested in designing fault-tolerant systems.