Redis Circuit Breaker

patterns redis circuit-breaker auth resilience

When Redis (ElastiCache) goes down, don’t hard-fail API calls. Fall back to direct validation.

Pattern

The auth middleware cached token validation in Redis. During an ElastiCache failover (maintenance window), Redis was unreachable for ~12 seconds. Without a circuit breaker, every API call failed.

Fix: Skip cache and validate the token directly with Okta when Redis is unreachable. Slower (~200ms vs ~2ms) but doesn’t hard-fail.

Applicability

Sarah (CTO) flagged this should be a pattern across all services, not just auth middleware. Any service reading from Redis should have a fallback path.

Related

• ecs-health-check-grace-period — related Redis startup timing issue
• demo-corp-team — Priya built this pattern

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Source: raw/demo-meeting-transcript.md | Ingested: 2026-04-13