• 1. Introduction
• 2. Documentation
• 3. Overview
• 4. Resilience patterns
• 5. Spring Boot
• 6. Usage examples
  • 6.1. CircuitBreaker, Retry and Fallback
  • 6.2. RateLimiter
  • 6.3. Bulkhead
• 7. Consume emitted events
  • 7.1. Examples
• 8. Talks
• 9. Companies that use Resilience4j
• 10. License

Resilience4j is a lightweight fault tolerance library inspired by Netflix Hystrix, but designed for Java 8 and functional programming. Lightweight, because the library only uses Vavr, which does not have any other external library dependencies. Netflix Hystrix, in contrast, has a compile dependency to Archaius which has many more external library dependencies such as Guava and Apache Commons Configuration.

Resilience4j provides higher-order functions (decorators) to enhance any functional interface, lambda expression or method reference with a Circuit Breaker, Rate Limiter, Retry or Bulkhead. You can stack more than one decorator on any functional interface, lambda expression or method reference. The advantage is that you have the choice to select the decorators you need and nothing else.

Setup and usage is described in our User Guide.

• 有志による日本語訳(非公式) Japanese translation by volunteers(Unofficial)

Resilience4j provides several core modules:

• resilience4j-circuitbreaker: Circuit breaking

• resilience4j-ratelimiter: Rate limiting

• resilience4j-bulkhead: Bulkheading

• resilience4j-retry: Automatic retrying (sync and async)

• resilience4j-timelimiter: Timeout handling

• resilience4j-cache: Result caching

There are also add-on modules for metrics, Retrofit, Feign, Kotlin, Spring, Ratpack, Vertx, RxJava2 and more.

Above table is based on Polly: resilience policies.

Setup and usage in Spring Boot 2 is demonstrated here.

6.1. CircuitBreaker, Retry and Fallback

// Simulates a Backend Service
public interface BackendService {
    String doSomething();
}

// Create a CircuitBreaker (use default configuration)
CircuitBreaker circuitBreaker = CircuitBreaker.ofDefaults("backendName");
// Create a Retry with at most 3 retries and a fixed time interval between retries of 500ms
Retry retry = Retry.ofDefaults("backendName");

// Decorate your call to BackendService.doSomething() with a CircuitBreaker
Supplier<String> decoratedSupplier = CircuitBreaker
    .decorateSupplier(circuitBreaker, backendService::doSomething);

// Decorate your call with automatic retry
decoratedSupplier = Retry
    .decorateSupplier(retry, decoratedSupplier);

// Execute the decorated supplier and recover from any exception
String result = Try.ofSupplier(decoratedSupplier)
    .recover(throwable -> "Hello from Recovery").get();

// When you don't want to decorate your lambda expression,
// but just execute it and protect the call by a CircuitBreaker.
String result = circuitBreaker.executeSupplier(backendService::doSomething);

CircuitBreaker circuitBreaker = CircuitBreaker.ofDefaults("testName");
Observable.fromCallable(backendService::doSomething)
    .compose(CircuitBreakerOperator.of(circuitBreaker))

CircuitBreaker circuitBreaker = CircuitBreaker.ofDefaults("testName");
Mono.fromCallable(backendService::doSomething)
    .transformDeferred(CircuitBreakerOperator.of(circuitBreaker))

6.2. RateLimiter

// Create a custom RateLimiter configuration
RateLimiterConfig config = RateLimiterConfig.custom()
    .timeoutDuration(Duration.ofMillis(100))
    .limitRefreshPeriod(Duration.ofSeconds(1))
    .limitForPeriod(1)
    .build();
// Create a RateLimiter
RateLimiter rateLimiter = RateLimiter.of("backendName", config);

// Decorate your call to BackendService.doSomething()
Supplier<String> restrictedSupplier = RateLimiter
    .decorateSupplier(rateLimiter, backendService::doSomething);

// First call is successful
Try<String> firstTry = Try.ofSupplier(restrictedSupplier);
assertThat(firstTry.isSuccess()).isTrue();

// Second call fails, because the call was not permitted
Try<String> secondTry = Try.of(restrictedSupplier);
assertThat(secondTry.isFailure()).isTrue();
assertThat(secondTry.getCause()).isInstanceOf(RequestNotPermitted.class);

6.3. Bulkhead

// Create a custom Bulkhead configuration
BulkheadConfig config = BulkheadConfig.custom()
    .maxConcurrentCalls(150)
    .maxWaitDuration(100)
    .build();

Bulkhead bulkhead = Bulkhead.of("backendName", config);

Supplier<String> supplier = Bulkhead
    .decorateSupplier(bulkhead, backendService::doSomething);

// Create a custom ThreadPoolBulkhead configuration
ThreadPoolBulkheadConfig config = ThreadPoolBulkheadConfig.custom()
    .maxThreadPoolSize(10)
    .coreThreadPoolSize(2)
    .queueCapacity(20)
    .build();

ThreadPoolBulkhead bulkhead = ThreadPoolBulkhead.of("backendName", config);

// Decorate or execute immediately a lambda expression with a ThreadPoolBulkhead.
Supplier<CompletionStage<String>> supplier = ThreadPoolBulkhead
    .decorateSupplier(bulkhead, backendService::doSomething);

CompletionStage<String> execution = bulkhead
    .executeSupplier(backendService::doSomething);

CircuitBreaker, RateLimiter, Cache, Bulkhead, TimeLimiter and Retry components emit a stream of events. It can be consumed for logging, assertions and any other purpose.

7.1. Examples

circuitBreaker.getEventPublisher()
    .onSuccess(event -> logger.info(...))
    .onError(event -> logger.info(...))
    .onIgnoredError(event -> logger.info(...))
    .onReset(event -> logger.info(...))
    .onStateTransition(event -> logger.info(...));
// Or if you want to register a consumer listening to all events, you can do:
circuitBreaker.getEventPublisher()
    .onEvent(event -> logger.info(...));

RxJava2Adapter.toFlowable(circuitBreaker.getEventPublisher())
    .filter(event -> event.getEventType() == Type.ERROR)
    .cast(CircuitBreakerOnErrorEvent.class)
    .subscribe(event -> logger.info(...))

• Deutsche Telekom (In an application with over 400 million requests per day)

• AOL (In an application with low latency requirements)

• Netpulse (In a system with 40+ integrations)

• wescale.de (In a B2B integration platform)

• Topia (In an HR application built with microservices architecture)

• Auto Trader Group plc (The largest Britain digital automotive marketplace)

• PlayStation Network (A platform backend)

Copyright 2020 Robert Winkler, Bohdan Storozhuk, Mahmoud Romeh, Dan Maas and others

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.