Circuit breaker with kafka consumer

Question

Is there a way to implement a circuit breaker pattern with Spring Kafka based consumer . I am wondering while implementing my Spring kafka consumer is it possible to stop consuming records if there is a failure to process the data based on some external system and which throws a network error. However if the network issue is resolved the consumer should again process normally.

Genista

you can achieve this using apache-camel. check it out – Guertin

Answer 1

You can refer this solution if you want to stop consuming messages when downstream service or DB is down.

Example

• Consumer is calling service A
• Service A is calling External HTTP service B
• You want to setup circuit breaker when external Service B is down

In this case you can setup circuit breaker on Service A. Whenever External Service B is down then this circuit will open. Then upon state transition of this circuit breaker, call your listener/bindings(if you are using spring-cloud-stream) to stop/pause consumer. So your messages will stay on queue/topic until the circuit breaker is closed again & you dont have to deadletter messages or put them onto error queue/topic.

You can refer below link for detailed solution which uses Resilience4j for circuit breaker implementation & spring-cloud-stream for consumer.

https://dublincoders.com/circuit-breaker-kafka/

Luganda

can someone share me the github link for the URL – Vida

Answer 2

Retries with Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) is a good pattern to handle consumer failure, and Circuit Breaker pattern is good to handle producer issues.

Buggy

One issue generally I have seen with DLQ is there will be lot of pileup when application is not able to process for some reason. These DLQs needs to be replayed in original topic for reprocessing this continues until we solve the problem. The CB could solve this problem. why to consumer when we know it can't be processed? – Vaughnvaught

Answer 3

Given:

• Service A produces to topic T event e1
• Service B consumes from topic T event e1 and calls remote REST service r1

Then:

• As service A and B interact via topic T, no need of back-pressure is needed.
• You need to close the circuit between service B and remote REST service r1. To do so, you can just use the spring boot @HystrixCommand and throw an exception in the "fallbackMethod" method. That will not commit offsets and you will re-consume event e1 as long as the circuit is open.

This is how I have done it :-) If you have found a better way please share!

Spinescent