Production LessonLearned in productionAll levels
Retries need idempotency
Retrying unsafe work can multiply damage instead of improving reliability.
Last reviewed July 2026
What I keep in mind
Networks fail and clients retry. Before retrying a write, I ask whether repeating it produces the same result.
- Use stable idempotency keys for business operations
- Enforce uniqueness in durable storage
- Return the original result for repeated requests
- Use bounded backoff with jitter
- Observe retry exhaustion and provide recovery tooling
#reliability#apis#queues