Failures and the circuit breaker pattern with Feign

The Feign client is, by default, integrated with Ribbon and Hystrix. This means that, if you wish, you can apply different approaches to deal with latency and timeouts in your system when using that library. The first of these approaches is a connection retry mechanism provided by the Ribbon client. The second is a circuit breaker pattern and a fallback implementation available under the Hystrix project, which has already been discussed in the previous sections of this chapter.

Retrying the connection with Ribbon

Hystrix is enabled by default for the application when using a Feign library. This means that you should disable it in the configuration settings if you do not want to use it. For the purpose of testing a retry mechanism with Ribbon, I suggest that you disable Hystrix. In order to enable connection retrying for Feign, you only have to set two configuration properties—MaxAutoRetries and MaxAutoRetriesNextServer. The important settings...