Add a method for opening the circuit breaker for a specified time

[JasonMathison]

If our hystrix encapsulated request receives a 503 with a Retry-After header or a 429 rate limiting response it would seem ideal to be able to programmatically open the circuit for a specified time based on the response from the external service.

Our service could do this with the forceOpen configuration option, however it would be up to us to create a timer to manually close the circuit again. Having Hystrix handle this natively would create a lot less complexity for consumers of the service.

[mattrjacobs]

This is an area where Hystrix does not have a lot to offer. It is, by design, agnostic about the type of work that happens inside of a command. If you'd like custom retry/timeout mechanisms, those need to be solved at the IPC layer. I'd also note that the sort of promises Hystrix offers are fairly coarse-grained. Thread pool rejection and short-circuiting can occur to otherwise-indistinguishable command instances, for example.

[JasonMathison]

I don't quite follow what you are saying. My request isn't about Hystrix understanding HTTP response codes or anything like that. The Hystrix consumer would be responsible for recognizing that opening the circuit is appropriate. The issue is that today the consumer would need to do all of the lifting of opening and then closing the circuit at the right time. Hystrix clearly already has all of the plumbing needed to open a circuit and start testing it again after a certain amount of time. I was just hoping to make that "open and start testing again after a certain amount of time" available via the API.

[mattrjacobs]

OK, thanks for the clarification. At the moment, there's only a single implementation of circuit-breaker logic that's possible with Hystrix. Of course, you can imagine many possible variants that might be good for one reason or another. There's a longstanding issue open to add a pluggable circuit-breaking strategy, perhaps you (or someone else) is interested in taking a whack at that?

#9