My take on resilience inspired by https://johnnunemaker.com/resilience-in-ruby/

resilience.rb

class Client
  class NotificationsResponse
    attr_reader :content, :error

    def self.build(&block)
      error = false
      content = begin
                  yield
                rescue Errno::ECONNREFUSED => exception
                  error = exception
                  {} # sensible default
                end
      self.new(content, error)
    end

    def initialize(content, error)
      @error = error
      @content = content
    end


    def ok?
      @error == false
    end
  end

  def notifications
    NotificationsResponse.build do
      request = Net::HTTP::Get.new('/')
      http = Net::HTTP.new('localhost', 9999)
      response = http.request(request)
      JSON.parse(response.body)
    end
  end
end

client = Client.new
response = client.notifications

if response.ok?
  # do something worderfull
else
  p "Failed: #{response.error}"
end