Resilience4j is a lightweight fault tolerance library inspired by Netflix Hystrix, but designed for 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.

Supplier<String> supplier = () -> backendService.doSomething(param1, param2);

Supplier<String> decoratedSupplier = Decorators.ofSupplier(supplier)
  .withRetry(Retry.ofDefaults("name"))
  .withCircuitBreaker(CircuitBreaker.ofDefaults("name"))
  .withBulkhead(Bulkhead.ofDefaults("name"));  

String result = Try.ofSupplier(decoratedSupplier)
  .recover(throwable -> "Hello from Recovery").get();

With Resilience4j you don’t have to go all-in, you can pick what you need.