Retries, backoff and jitter

Retrying hides transient failures, but immediate retries multiply load on a struggling service. Exponential backoff spaces attempts out and random jitter stops clients from retrying in lockstep.

Where it shows up in real systems

  • Service mesh

    Moves resilience and security out of application code into infrastructure, with uniform telemetry for every call. Each hop pays a little latency and the mesh itself is critical infrastructure to operate.

    In production: Istio, Linkerd, Consul Connect, AWS App Mesh, Cilium

  • Payment provider

    Calls take hundreds of milliseconds, a small share fails transiently, and the provider rate-limits you. Never charge twice: send an idempotency key with each request, retry with backoff, and move the call out of the user request path when you can.

    In production: Stripe, Adyen, PayPal, Moneris, Square

See it break, then fix it

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