pageserver: circuit breaker on compaction (#8359)

## Problem

We already back off on compaction retries, but the impact of a failing
compaction can be so great that backing off up to 300s isn't enough. The
impact is consuming a lot of I/O+CPU in the case of image layer
generation for large tenants, and potentially also leaking disk space.

Compaction failures are extremely rare and almost always indicate a bug,
frequently a bug that will not let compaction to proceed until it is
fixed.

Related: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/6738

## Summary of changes

- Introduce a CircuitBreaker type
- Add a circuit breaker for compaction, with a policy that after 5
failures, compaction will not be attempted again for 24 hours.
- Add metrics that we can alert on: any >0 value for
`pageserver_circuit_breaker_broken_total` should generate an alert.
- Add a test that checks this works as intended.

Couple notes to reviewers:
- Circuit breakers are intrinsically a defense-in-depth measure: this is
not the solution to any underlying issues, it is just a general
mitigation for "unknown unknowns" that might be encountered in future.
- This PR isn't primarily about writing a perfect CircuitBreaker type:
the one in this PR is meant to be just enough to mitigate issues in
compaction, and make it easy to monitor/alert on these failures. We can
refine this type in future as/when we want to use it elsewhere.

libs/utils/src/circuit_breaker.rs

@@ -0,0 +1,114 @@
+use std::{
+    fmt::Display,
+    time::{Duration, Instant},
+};
+
+use metrics::IntCounter;
+
+/// Circuit breakers are for operations that are expensive and fallible: if they fail repeatedly,
+/// we will stop attempting them for some period of time, to avoid denial-of-service from retries, and
+/// to mitigate the log spam from repeated failures.
+pub struct CircuitBreaker {
+    /// An identifier that enables us to log useful errors when a circuit is broken
+    name: String,
+
+    /// Consecutive failures since last success
+    fail_count: usize,
+
+    /// How many consecutive failures before we break the circuit
+    fail_threshold: usize,
+
+    /// If circuit is broken, when was it broken?
+    broken_at: Option<Instant>,
+
+    /// If set, we will auto-reset the circuit this long after it was broken.  If None, broken
+    /// circuits stay broken forever, or until success() is called.
+    reset_period: Option<Duration>,
+
+    /// If this is true, no actual circuit-breaking happens.  This is for overriding a circuit breaker
+    /// to permit something to keep running even if it would otherwise have tripped it.
+    short_circuit: bool,
+}
+
+impl CircuitBreaker {
+    pub fn new(name: String, fail_threshold: usize, reset_period: Option<Duration>) -> Self {
+        Self {
+            name,
+            fail_count: 0,
+            fail_threshold,
+            broken_at: None,
+            reset_period,
+            short_circuit: false,
+        }
+    }
+
+    /// Construct an unbreakable circuit breaker, for use in unit tests etc.
+    pub fn short_circuit() -> Self {
+        Self {
+            name: String::new(),
+            fail_threshold: 0,
+            fail_count: 0,
+            broken_at: None,
+            reset_period: None,
+            short_circuit: true,
+        }
+    }
+
+    pub fn fail<E>(&mut self, metric: &IntCounter, error: E)
+    where
+        E: Display,
+    {
+        if self.short_circuit {
+            return;
+        }
+
+        self.fail_count += 1;
+        if self.broken_at.is_none() && self.fail_count >= self.fail_threshold {
+            self.break_circuit(metric, error);
+        }
+    }
+
+    /// Call this after successfully executing an operation
+    pub fn success(&mut self, metric: &IntCounter) {
+        self.fail_count = 0;
+        if let Some(broken_at) = &self.broken_at {
+            tracing::info!(breaker=%self.name, "Circuit breaker failure ended (was broken for {})",
+                humantime::format_duration(broken_at.elapsed()));
+            self.broken_at = None;
+            metric.inc();
+        }
+    }
+
+    /// Call this before attempting an operation, and skip the operation if we are currently broken.
+    pub fn is_broken(&mut self) -> bool {
+        if self.short_circuit {
+            return false;
+        }
+
+        if let Some(broken_at) = self.broken_at {
+            match self.reset_period {
+                Some(reset_period) if broken_at.elapsed() > reset_period => {
+                    self.reset_circuit();
+                    false
+                }
+                _ => true,
+            }
+        } else {
+            false
+        }
+    }
+
+    fn break_circuit<E>(&mut self, metric: &IntCounter, error: E)
+    where
+        E: Display,
+    {
+        self.broken_at = Some(Instant::now());
+        tracing::error!(breaker=%self.name, "Circuit breaker broken!  Last error: {error}");
+        metric.inc();
+    }
+
+    fn reset_circuit(&mut self) {
+        self.broken_at = None;
+        self.fail_count = 0;
+    }
+}

libs/utils/src/lib.rs

@@ -98,6 +98,8 @@ pub mod poison;
 
 pub mod toml_edit_ext;
 
+pub mod circuit_breaker;
+
 /// This is a shortcut to embed git sha into binaries and avoid copying the same build script to all packages
 ///
 /// we have several cases: