Difference between Ribbon circuit breaker and Hystrix

Question

I'm giving a try to Spring Cloud and Spring Boot. It uses Netflix OSS Applications, among them there are Ribbon and Hystrix.

Ribbon is a load balancer and comes with some features, one of them is a circuit breaker.

Hystrix is a circuit breaker application.

I don't know the difference between them both. Why use Hystrix if Ribbon already comes with a circuit breaker feature.

Can I use both applications in the same connector?

Irresponsive

Answer 1

I'm not aware of any circuit breaker in ribbon except integration with Hystrix. We recommend using both, ribbon for the load balancer and hystrix for the circuit breaker.

Teresiateresina

Thank you for your answer, this is taken from the Ribbon site. github.com/Netflix/ribbon/wiki/… And github.com/Netflix/ribbon/wiki/… It isn't a perfect circuit braker, but it can do the job. – Irresponsive

The Circut breaker pattern involve a lot more than just checking if a server is up, and moving on to the next if it is not. Probing (sending some reqiests through), autorecovery, robust and predictable fault handling etc. – Midi

@Teresiateresina Is there a place where I can find how ribbon & hystrix integrate. Some load balancing IRules like AvailabilityFilteringRule does limited circuit breaking (by load balancing the uprequests only among the servers that look alive, if none look alive, throws an exception [maybe?]). Can you explain how ribbon handles non 200 responses & cascade that info to hystrix (is it by explicitly throwing exception?) – Battle

Could you clarify who is the "we" in "we recommend"? Thanks :) – Pironi