"Traditional circuit breakers fail in three ways: Atrion models your system as an electrical circuit. Each route has resistance that changes based on telemetry: R(t) = R_base + Pressure + Momentum + ScarTissue Why physics instead of heuristics? Traditional circuit breakers and rate limiters introduce complex behavior that often leads to complex failures. Atrion takes a different approach: instead of arbitrary static limits, we model traffic as a physical system with predictable, mathematically guaranteed behavior."
"Atrion is built on Control Theory principles (specifically PID-like feedback loops without integral windup) and Fluid Dynamics. Traffic ≈ Fluid with Pressure, Resistance, and Momentum The system ensures stability via a Critical Damping approach. We calculate a 'Scar Tissue' metric that accumulates based on failure severity and decays over time. This creates a mathematically guaranteed hysteresis loop, preventing the 'flapping' (rapid open/close) that plagues standard circuit breakers."
""Dead services are easy. Zombie services are the killers." Standard health checks fail when a service is technically alive but behaviorally broken-responding slowly, returning garbage, or stuck in cleanup loops. Atrion doesn't just count requests; it measures Service Resistance. Consider this scenario: A processing node receives a complex request It takes longer than expected → upstream times out The cancellation triggers cleanup that also takes too long Meanwhile, upstream retries, but the node is still "cleaning up" Requests queue, the original gets resent, and... cascade failure"
Model traffic as a physical system with routes represented as electrical resistances that change over time: R(t) = R_base + Pressure + Momentum + ScarTissue. Replace static heuristics with control-theory and fluid-dynamics concepts, using PID-like feedback without integral windup and a critical-damping approach to ensure stability. Compute a Scar Tissue metric that accumulates with failure severity and decays over time to provide guaranteed hysteresis and prevent flapping. Measure service resistance rather than simple liveness to detect slow or malfunctioning "zombie" services. Combine Z-Score auto-tuning, deterministic backpressure, and priority-based load shedding to maintain predictable behavior and avoid cascades.
#physics-based-control #deterministic-backpressure #scar-tissue-hysteresis #z-score-auto-tuning #priority-load-shedding
Read at GitHub
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]