Files
nexus/sreweekly/articles/512/07-why-retries-are-more-dangerous-than-failures.html
2026-09-12 17:23:01 +08:00

2920 lines
142 KiB
HTML
Raw Blame History

This file contains ambiguous Unicode characters
This file contains Unicode characters that might be confused with other characters. If you think that this is intentional, you can safely ignore this warning. Use the Escape button to reveal them.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<meta name="description" content="Retries can amplify failures into outages. Use backoff, circuit breakers, idempotency, load shedding, and observability to keep systems stable under pressure.">
<meta name="keywords" content="Chaos engineering, Database, IT, Site reliability engineering">
<meta property="og:description" content="Retries can amplify failures into outages. Use backoff, circuit breakers, idempotency, load shedding, and observability to keep systems stable under pressure.">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="dzone.com">
<meta property="og:title" content="Why Retries Are More Dangerous Than Failures">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://dzone.com/articles/why-retries-are-more-dangerous-than-failures-2">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/storage/article-thumb/18896299-thumb.jpg">
<meta property="og:type" content="article">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@DZoneInc">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/storage/article-thumb/18896299-thumb.jpg">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Retries can amplify failures into outages. Use backoff, circuit breakers, idempotency, load shedding, and observability to keep systems stable under pressure.">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Why Retries Are More Dangerous Than Failures">
<meta name="referrer" content="origin-when-cross-origin">
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="kndbhxcupfEqWmZclhCpB6vlgOs7QSmx2UHAGGnP2mA">
<meta name="df-verify" content="df0d76632b4543">
<link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/images/favicon.png">
<link rel="image_src" href="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/storage/article-thumb/18896299-thumb.jpg">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://dzone.com/articles/why-retries-are-more-dangerous-than-failures-2">
<title>Why Retries Are More Dangerous Than Failures</title>
<link rel="preload" href="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/font/fontello.woff?11773374" as="font" type="font/woff" crossorigin="anonymous">
<link rel="stylesheet" media="all" href="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/ftl/icons.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" media="all" href="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/lib/static/bootstrap/bootstrap.min.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" media="all" href="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/ftl/article/global.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" media="all" href="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/ftl/header-updated/styles.css">
<style>
:root {
--xs-size: 2px;
--sm-size: 5px;
--md-size: 10px;
--lg-size: 15px;
--xl-size: 25px;
--sm-border-size: 8px;
--sm-font-size: 13px;
--sm-plus-font-size: 16px;
--md-font-size: 18px;
--lg-font-size: 22px;
--xl-font-size: 26px;
}
/* Display Quick-Access Classes */
.display-none { display: none; }
.display-block { display: block; }
.display-inline { display: inline; }
.display-inline-block { display: inline-block; }
/* Margin Quick-Access Classes */
.m-xs { margin: var(--xs-size); }
.m-sm { margin: var(--sm-size); }
.m-md { margin: var(--md-size); }
.m-lg { margin: var(--lg-size); }
.m-xl { margin: var(--xl-size); }
.mt-xs, .my-xs { margin-top: var(--xs-size); }
.mr-xs, .mx-xs { margin-right: var(--xs-size); }
.mb-xs, .my-xs { margin-bottom: var(--xs-size); }
.ml-xs, .mx-xs { margin-left: var(--xs-size); }
.mt-sm, .my-sm { margin-top: var(--sm-size); }
.mr-sm, .mx-sm { margin-right: var(--sm-size); }
.mb-sm, .my-sm { margin-bottom: var(--sm-size); }
.ml-sm, .mx-sm { margin-left: var(--sm-size); }
.mt-md, .my-md { margin-top: var(--md-size); }
.mr-md, .mx-md { margin-right: var(--md-size); }
.mb-md, .my-md { margin-bottom: var(--md-size); }
.ml-md, .mx-md { margin-left: var(--md-size); }
.mt-lg, .my-lg { margin-top: var(--lg-size); }
.mr-lg, .mx-lg { margin-right: var(--lg-size); }
.mb-lg, .my-lg { margin-bottom: var(--lg-size); }
.ml-lg, .mx-lg { margin-left: var(--lg-size); }
.mt-xl, .my-xl { margin-top: var(--xl-size); }
.mr-xl, .mx-xl { margin-right: var(--xl-size); }
.mb-xl, .my-xl { margin-bottom: var(--xl-size); }
.ml-xl, .mx-xl { margin-left: var(--xl-size); }
.ml-auto, .mx-auto { margin-left: auto; }
.mr-auto, .mx-auto { margin-right: auto; }
.mt-auto, .my-auto { margin-top: auto; }
.mb-auto, .my-auto { margin-bottom: auto; }
.my-none, .mt-none { margin-top: 0 !important; }
.mx-none, .mr-none { margin-right: 0 !important; }
.my-none, .mb-none { margin-bottom: 0 !important; }
.mx-none, .ml-none { margin-left: 0 !important; }
/* Padding Quick-Access Classes */
.p-xs { padding: var(--xs-size); }
.p-sm { padding: var(--sm-size); }
.p-md { padding: var(--md-size); }
.p-lg { padding: var(--lg-size); }
.p-xl { padding: var(--xl-size); }
.pt-xs, .py-xs { padding-top: var(--xs-size); }
.pr-xs, .px-xs { padding-right: var(--xs-size); }
.pb-xs, .py-xs { padding-bottom: var(--xs-size); }
.pl-xs, .px-xs { padding-left: var(--xs-size); }
.pt-sm, .py-sm { padding-top: var(--sm-size); }
.pr-sm, .px-sm { padding-right: var(--sm-size); }
.pb-sm, .py-sm { padding-bottom: var(--sm-size); }
.pl-sm, .px-sm { padding-left: var(--sm-size); }
.pt-md, .py-md { padding-top: var(--md-size); }
.pr-md, .px-md { padding-right: var(--md-size); }
.pb-md, .py-md { padding-bottom: var(--md-size); }
.pl-md, .px-md { padding-left: var(--md-size); }
.pt-lg, .py-lg { padding-top: var(--lg-size); }
.pr-lg, .px-lg { padding-right: var(--lg-size); }
.pb-lg, .py-lg { padding-bottom: var(--lg-size); }
.pl-lg, .px-lg { padding-left: var(--lg-size); }
.pt-xl, .py-xl { padding-top: var(--xl-size); }
.pr-xl, .px-xl { padding-right: var(--xl-size); }
.pb-xl, .py-xl { padding-bottom: var(--xl-size); }
.pl-xl, .px-xl { padding-left: var(--xl-size); }
.py-none, .pt-none { padding-top: 0 !important; }
.px-none, .pr-none { padding-right: 0 !important; }
.py-none, .pb-none { padding-bottom: 0 !important; }
.px-none, .pl-none { padding-left: 0 !important; }
/* Flex Quick-Access Classes */
.flex {
display: flex;
}
.flex-column {
display: flex;
flex-direction: column;
}
.flex-column-reverse {
display: flex;
flex-direction: column-reverse;
}
.flex-row {
display: flex;
flex-direction: row;
}
.flex-row-reverse {
display: flex;
flex-direction: row-reverse;
}
.flex-wrap {
flex-wrap: wrap;
}
.flex-grow {
flex-grow: 1;
}
.align-center { align-items: center; }
.align-end { align-items: flex-end; }
.content-center {
align-content: center;
}
.justify-center { justify-content: center; }
.justify-start { justify-content: flex-start; }
.justify-end { justify-content: flex-end; }
.justify-around { justify-content: space-around; }
.justify-between { justify-content: space-between; }
.justify-evenly { justify-content: space-evenly; }
.gap-sm { gap: var(--sm-size); }
.gap-md { gap: var(--md-size); }
.gap-lg { gap: var(--lg-size); }
.gap-xl { gap: var(--xl-size); }
/* Display Quick-Access Classes */
.inline-block { display: inline-block; }
/* Font Quick-Access Classes */
.font-xl { font-size: var(--xl-font-size); }
.font-lg { font-size: var(--lg-font-size); }
.font-md { font-size: var(--md-font-size); }
.font-sm-plus { font-size: var(--sm-plus-font-size); }
.font-sm { font-size: var(--sm-font-size); }
.font-strike { text-decoration: line-through; }
.font-underline { text-decoration: underline; }
.font-overline { text-decoration: overline; }
.font-italic { font-style: italic; }
.font-bold { font-weight: bold; }
.font-black { color: #000000; }
.font-white { color: #ffffff; }
.font-gray { color: var(--brand-gray-text); }
.font-danger { color: var(--header-dropdown-button-bg-danger); }
.font-center { text-align: center; }
.no-wrap { white-space: nowrap; }
/* Consistent headings between h and non-h tags */
.heading {
margin-top: 0;
margin-bottom: var(--md-size);
}
.heading.font-xl { line-height: var(--xl-font-size); }
.heading.font-lg { line-height: var(--lg-font-size); }
.heading.font-md { line-height: var(--md-font-size); }
.heading.font-sm-plus { line-height: var(--sm-plus-font-size); }
.heading.font-sm { line-height: var(--sm-font-size); }
/* Font Clamp Quick-Access Classes */
.line-clamp,
.line-clamp-2,
.line-clamp-3,
.line-clamp-4,
.line-clamp-5 {
display: -webkit-box;
-webkit-line-clamp: 4;
-webkit-box-orient: vertical;
overflow: hidden;
text-overflow: ellipsis;
}
.line-clamp-2 { -webkit-line-clamp: 2 !important; }
.line-clamp-3 { -webkit-line-clamp: 3 !important; }
.line-clamp-4 { -webkit-line-clamp: 4 !important; }
.line-clamp-5 { -webkit-line-clamp: 5 !important; }
/* User-Select Quick-Access Classes */
.select-none { user-select: none; }
/* Position Quick-Access Classes */
.absolute { position: absolute; }
.relative { position: relative; }
.float-left { float: left; }
.float-right { float: right; }
.pos-top { top: 0; }
.pos-right { right: 0; }
.pos-bottom { bottom: 0; }
.pos-left { left: 0; }
.va-top { vertical-align: top; }
.va-middle { vertical-align: middle; }
.va-bottom { vertical-align: bottom; }
/* Transition Quick-Access Classes */
.trans-linear-quick {
transition: all 0.15s linear;
}
/* Background Quick-Access Classes */
.bg-gray { background: #cccccc; }
.bg-white { background-color: white; }
.bg-none { background: none; }
/* Border Quick-Access Classes */
.border-gray { border: 1px solid #cccccc; }
.tab-pane.border-gray { border: 1px solid #ddd; }
.no-border, .border-none { border: none !important; }
.bt-none { border-top: none !important; }
.br-none { border-right: none !important; }
.bb-none { border-bottom: none !important; }
.bl-none { border-left: none !important; }
/* Border Radius Quick-Access Classes */
.round-t-sm, .round-tl-sm { border-top-left-radius: var(--sm-border-size); }
.round-t-sm, .round-tr-sm { border-top-right-radius: var(--sm-border-size); }
.round-b-sm, .round-bl-sm { border-bottom-left-radius: var(--sm-border-size); }
.round-b-sm, .round-br-sm { border-bottom-right-radius: var(--sm-border-size); }
.round-sm { border-radius: var(--sm-border-size); }
.round-fully { border-radius: 50%; }
/* Misc Quick-Access Classes */
.haikei {
position: relative;
background-image: url('https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/images/polygon-scatter-haikei-shapes.svg');
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-size: cover;
}
.haikei:before {
content: '';
position:absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
background-color: var(--color-event-background);
z-index: -1;
}
.margin-auto-center {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
.flex-auto-center {
display: flex;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
.mw-1100 { max-width: 1100px; }
.mw-1300 { max-width: 1300px; }
.full-width { width: 100%; }
.h-separator {
background-color: #cccccc;
height: 1px;
width: 100%;
margin: 5px auto;
}
.no-spacing {
margin: 0 !important;
padding: 0 !important;
}
.inherit-color { color: inherit; }
.inherit-decoration { text-decoration: inherit; }
/* Table Quick-Access Classes */
.table-border-gray tr:not(:last-child) {
border-bottom: 1px solid #cccccc;
}
table.full-width tr td:last-child {
width:100%;
}
/* Animation Quick-Access Classes */
@keyframes anim-spin {
0% { transform: rotate(0deg); }
100% { transform: rotate(359deg); }
}
.anim-spin {
display: inline-block;
animation: anim-spin 2s infinite linear;
}
.hov-pointer { cursor: pointer; }
.hov-brighten:hover { filter: brightness(1.2); }
.hov-darken:hover { filter: brightness(0.95); }
.hov-underline:hover { text-decoration: underline; }
/* Small tweaks related to components when using these styles */
.nav-tabs {
border-bottom: none;
}
.tab-content > .flex-column.active,
.tab-content > .flex-row.active {
display: flex;
}
/* Alpine components with x-cloak should not be visible by default until conditionals kick in */
[x-cloak] { display: none !important; }
</style>
<link rel="stylesheet" media="all" href="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/ftl/alpine-components/modal.css">
<script defer src="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/lib/alpinejs/3.13.2/cdn.min.js"></script>
<script>
document.addEventListener('alpine:init', () => {
Alpine.store('article', {
id: null,
engagement: {
open: false,
page: 1,
users: [],
additional: true,
loading: false,
initializing: false,
unauthorized: false,
enqueued: null,
dequeued: null,
reset() {
this.open = false;
this.page = 1;
this.users.splice(0);
this.additional = true;
this.loading = false;
this.initializing = false;
this.enqueued = null;
this.dequeued = null;
},
enqueue(user) {
this.dequeued = null;
this.enqueued = user;
},
dequeue(user) {
this.enqueued = null;
this.dequeued = user;
},
add(user) {
this.users.push(user);
this.enqueued = null;
},
remove(user) {
const index = this.users.findIndex(u => u.id === user.id);
if (index !== -1) {
this.users.splice(index, 1);
}
this.dequeued = null;
},
contains(user) {
return this.users.filter(u => u.id === user.id).length;
}
}
});
Alpine.effect(() => {
const store = Alpine.store('article');
if (!store.engagement.additional && store.engagement.enqueued) {
if (!store.engagement.contains(store.engagement.enqueued)) {
store.engagement.add(store.engagement.enqueued);
}
}
});
Alpine.effect(() => {
const store = Alpine.store('article');
if (store.engagement.page && store.engagement.dequeued) {
store.engagement.remove(store.engagement.dequeued);
}
})
});
</script></head>
<body x-data>
<div class="skybox skybox-closeBtn dz_skybox" data-gpt-slot="skybox" id="div-gpt-ad-1435246566686-99"></div>
<header id="ftl-header">
<div class="header-top">
<div class="header-container">
<div class="pull-left logo-container">
<div class="logo">
<a class="inner" href="/">
<picture>
<source srcset="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/images/dz_logo_2021_cropped.webp" type="image/webp">
<source srcset="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/images/dz_logo_2021_cropped.png" type="image/png">
<img src="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/images/dz_logo_2021_cropped.png" width="181" height="56" alt="DZone">
</picture>
</a>
</div>
</div>
<div class="pull-right login-and-search">
<div id="authenticated-block" class="logged-in">
<div class="welcome-back">Thanks for visiting DZone today,</div>
<div id="user-header" class="user-info">
<button class="user-avatar">
<span id="header-username" class="username"></span>
<img id="header-avatar" src="" alt="user avatar">
</button>
<div id="user-dropdown" class="browse-user-menu">
<div class="user-content">
<a id="header-user-plug" href="#" class="user-description"></a>
<a id="header-user-edit" href="#" class="edit-profile">Edit Profile</a>
</div>
<ul class="user-actions">
<li id="first-user-action">
<a id="header-dropdown-manage-email" href="#">Manage Email Subscriptions</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="/articles/how-to-submit-a-post-to-dzone?utm_source=DZone&utm_medium=user_dropdown&utm_campaign=how_to_post">
How to Post to DZone
</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="/articles/dzones-article-submission-guidelines">
Article Submission Guidelines
</a>
</li>
</ul>
<div class="bottom">
<a href="/users/logout.html" class="sign-out">Sign Out</a>
<a id="dropdown-view-profile" href="#" class="view-profile">View Profile</a>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="post-content">
<button id="post-button" class="post-content--button">
<span class="post-class">Post</span>
<i class="icon-plus"></i>
</button>
<div id="post-menu" class="posting-links">
<div class="posting-links-menu">
<ul>
<li>
<img src="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/images/dz-postarticle.svg" width="15" height="18" style="width: 15px; height: 18px;">
<a href="/content/article/post.html">Post an Article</a>
</li>
<li>
<a id="drafts-link" href="#">Manage My Drafts</a>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div id="unauthenticated-block">
<div class="dz-intro">Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.</div>
<div class="mobile-invisible sign-in-join">
<a href="/users/login.html">Log In</a>
<span class="dz-intro-span">/</span>
<a href="/static/registration.html">Join</a>
</div>
<a class="join-icon" href="/users/login.html" aria-label="User">
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="24" height="24" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" class="lucide svg-user lucide-user-icon lucide-user">
<path d="M19 21v-2a4 4 0 0 0-4-4H9a4 4 0 0 0-4 4v2"></path>
<circle cx="12" cy="7" r="4"></circle>
</svg>
</a>
</div>
<script>
document.addEventListener('alpine:init', () => {
Alpine.data('searchDrawer', () => ({
open: false,
query: '',
minCharsMet: false,
toggleVisibility() {
this.open = !this.open;
if (this.open) {
this.$nextTick(() => {
this.$refs.query.focus();
});
}
},
updateSearchValue() {
if (!this.query || !this.query.length || this.query.length < 3) {
this.minCharsMet = false;
return;
}
this.minCharsMet = true;
localStorage.setItem('ls.searchValue', this.query);
},
searchSite() {
if (this.minCharsMet) {
window.location = '/search';
}
}
}));
});
</script>
<div class="headerSearch" x-data="searchDrawer()" x-cloak>
<button class="btn-search dropdown-toggle" x-on:click="toggleVisibility()" aria-label="Search">
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="24" height="24" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" class="lucide svg-search lucide-search-icon lucide-search">
<path d="m21 21-4.34-4.34"></path>
<circle cx="11" cy="11" r="8"></circle>
</svg>
</button>
<template x-teleport=".header-container">
<div id="search-drawer" x-show="open" x-on:click.outside="open = false" x-transition>
<div class="search-input">
<input type="text"
placeholder="Search"
autofocus="autofocus"
x-model="query"
x-ref="query"
x-on:input.change="updateSearchValue()"
x-on:keyup.enter="searchSite()"
>
<button x-on:click="searchSite()" x-bind:disabled="!minCharsMet">
<span>Search</span>
</button>
</div>
<div class="search-footer">
Please enter at least three characters to search
</div>
</div>
</template>
</div>
</div>
</div> </div>
<div class="header-bottom">
<div class="header-bottom-container">
<a class="resource-link" href="/refcardz">Refcards</a>
<a class="resource-link" href="/trendreports">Trend Reports</a>
<div class="resource-link link-menu">
<a href="/events">Events</a>
<a href="/events/video-library">Video Library</a>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<nav class="header-menu-bar">
<div class="header-menu resource-category">
<a href="/refcardz">Refcards</a>
</div>
<div class="header-menu-separator resource-category-separator"></div>
<div class="header-menu resource-category">
<a href="/trendreports">Trend Reports</a>
</div>
<div class="header-menu-separator resource-category-separator"></div>
<div class="header-menu resource-category no-bottom-radius" data-click-activation>
<p class="menu-label">Events</p>
<div class="header-menu-items">
<div class="header-menu-columns">
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/events">View Events</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/events/video-library">Video Library</a>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="header-menu zone-menu" data-click-activation>
<p class="menu-label">Zones <i class="icon-down-dir icon-closed"></i><i class="icon-right-dir icon-open"></i></p>
<div class="header-menu-items">
<div class="header-menu-columns">
<div class="header-menu-column-item">
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/culture-and-methodologies">Culture and Methodologies</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/agile">Agile</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/career-development">Career Development</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/methodologies">Methodologies</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/team-management">Team Management</a>
</div>
<div class="header-menu-column-item">
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/data-engineering">Data Engineering</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/ai-ml">AI/ML</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/big-data">Big Data</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/data">Data</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/databases">Databases</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/iot">IoT</a>
</div>
<div class="header-menu-column-item">
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/software-design-and-architecture">Software Design and Architecture</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/cloud-architecture">Cloud Architecture</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/containers">Containers</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/integration">Integration</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/microservices">Microservices</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/performance">Performance</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/security">Security</a>
</div>
<div class="header-menu-column-item">
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/coding">Coding</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/frameworks">Frameworks</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/java">Java</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/javascript">JavaScript</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/languages">Languages</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/tools">Tools</a>
</div>
<div class="header-menu-column-item">
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/testing-deployment-and-maintenance">Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/deployment">Deployment</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/devops-and-cicd">DevOps and CI/CD</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/maintenance">Maintenance</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/monitoring-and-observability">Monitoring and Observability</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/testing-tools-and-frameworks">Testing, Tools, and Frameworks</a>
</div>
<div class="header-menu-column-item sponsored">
<a class="header-menu-item" href="javascript:void(0)">Partner Zones</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/hubs/build-ai-agents-that-are-ready-for-production/">Build AI Agents That Are Ready for Production</a>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="header-menu parent-category" tabindex="1">
<a href="/culture-and-methodologies">Culture and Methodologies</a>
<div class="header-menu-items">
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/agile">Agile</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/career-development">Career Development</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/methodologies">Methodologies</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/team-management">Team Management</a>
</div>
</div>
<div class="header-menu-separator parent-category-separator"></div>
<div class="header-menu parent-category" tabindex="2">
<a href="/data-engineering">Data Engineering</a>
<div class="header-menu-items">
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/ai-ml">AI/ML</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/big-data">Big Data</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/data">Data</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/databases">Databases</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/iot">IoT</a>
</div>
</div>
<div class="header-menu-separator parent-category-separator"></div>
<div class="header-menu parent-category" tabindex="3">
<a href="/software-design-and-architecture">Software Design and Architecture</a>
<div class="header-menu-items">
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/cloud-architecture">Cloud Architecture</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/containers">Containers</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/integration">Integration</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/microservices">Microservices</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/performance">Performance</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/security">Security</a>
</div>
</div>
<div class="header-menu-separator parent-category-separator"></div>
<div class="header-menu parent-category" tabindex="4">
<a href="/coding">Coding</a>
<div class="header-menu-items">
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/frameworks">Frameworks</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/java">Java</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/javascript">JavaScript</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/languages">Languages</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/tools">Tools</a>
</div>
</div>
<div class="header-menu-separator parent-category-separator"></div>
<div class="header-menu parent-category" tabindex="5">
<a href="/testing-deployment-and-maintenance">Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance</a>
<div class="header-menu-items">
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/deployment">Deployment</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/devops-and-cicd">DevOps and CI/CD</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/maintenance">Maintenance</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/monitoring-and-observability">Monitoring and Observability</a>
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/testing-tools-and-frameworks">Testing, Tools, and Frameworks</a>
</div>
</div>
<div class="header-menu-separator parent-category-separator"></div>
<div class="header-menu parent-category sponsored" tabindex="6">
<a href="javascript:void(0)">Partner Zones</a>
<div class="header-menu-items sponsored">
<a class="header-menu-item" href="/hubs/build-ai-agents-that-are-ready-for-production/">Build AI Agents That Are Ready for Production</a>
</div>
</div>
<div class="header-menu-separator parent-category-separator"></div>
</nav>
</header>
<script>
const csrf = {
parameter: 'TH_CSRF',
header: 'X-TH-CSRF',
token: '998990420654478448'
}; // set csrf for auth-status script
</script>
<script>
addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {
handleRedirects();
handleMenus();
handleMobileMenuHeights();
handleGotoLinks();
});
function isHidden(element) {
try {
return window.getComputedStyle(element).display === 'none';
} catch (_) {
return false;
}
}
function getLink(element) {
if (element.hasAttribute('data-goto')) {
return element.getAttribute('data-goto');
}
return element.href;
}
function isLeftClick(event) {
if (event.altKey || event.shiftKey) {
return false;
} else if ('buttons' in event || 'which' in event) {
return event.buttons === 1 || event.which === 1;
} else {
return (event.button === 1 || (event.type === 'click'));
}
}
function handleRedirects() {
const redirections = [...document.querySelectorAll('[data-activate-menu]'), ...document.querySelectorAll('[data-click-target]')];
redirections.forEach(function(element) {
const menuSelector = element.getAttribute('data-activate-menu') || element.getAttribute('data-click-target');
const redirectingElement = document.querySelector(menuSelector);
if (redirectingElement) {
element.style.cursor = 'pointer';
const redirect = function(e) {
if (redirectingElement.hasAttribute('href') || redirectingElement.hasAttribute('data-goto')) {
if (redirectingElement.hasAttribute('data-new-window') || e.ctrlKey || e.metaKey) {
window.open(getLink(redirectingElement), '_blank');
} else {
window.open(getLink(redirectingElement), '_self');
}
} else {
const evt = new e.constructor(e.type, e);
redirectingElement.dispatchEvent(evt);
}
};
element.addEventListener('mouseup', redirect);
element.addEventListener('mousedown', (e) => e.preventDefault());
element.addEventListener('click', (e) => e.preventDefault());
}
});
}
function handleMenus() {
const menuElements = [
...document.querySelectorAll('.header-menu > a'),
...document.querySelectorAll('.header-menu > p.menu-label')
];
let scrollYMemory = -1;
function scrollToMemory() {
if (scrollYMemory !== -1) {
setTimeout(function() {
window.scrollTo(0, scrollYMemory);
scrollYMemory = -1;
}, 10);
}
}
function hideMenus() {
// unfocus menus & items, and set the menus to non-visible.
menuElements.forEach(function (element) {
element.blur();
element.parentElement.blur();
element.parentElement.classList.remove('menu-opened');
const menuItems = element.parentElement.querySelector('.header-menu-items');
if (menuItems) {
menuItems.style.display = 'none';
}
});
const wasHidden = document.body.style.overflowY === 'hidden';
document.body.style.overflowY = 'auto';
if (wasHidden) {
scrollToMemory();
}
}
function isEventOutsideMenu(e) {
return e.target.closest && !e.target.closest('.header-menu') && !e.target.closest('[data-activate-menu]');
}
// Handle mobile menu toggling
menuElements.forEach(function(element) {
const menu = element.parentElement;
const headerItems = menu.querySelector('.header-menu-items');
const menuEntries = headerItems ? headerItems.querySelectorAll('.header-menu-item') : [];
const focus = function() {
menu.focus();
menu.classList.add('menu-opened');
if (headerItems) {
headerItems.style.display = 'block';
}
if (menu.classList.contains('zone-menu')) {
scrollYMemory = window.scrollY;
document.body.style.overflowY = 'hidden';
} else {
scrollYMemory = -1;
}
};
const unfocus = function() {
menu.blur();
menu.classList.remove('menu-opened');
if (headerItems) {
headerItems.style.display = 'none';
}
const wasHidden = document.body.style.overflowY === 'hidden';
document.body.style.overflowY = 'auto';
if (wasHidden) {
scrollToMemory();
}
};
const toggleMenuVisibility = function(e) {
if ((e.type === 'click' || e.type === 'mouseup') && !isLeftClick(e)) {
e.preventDefault();
return;
}
const hidden = isHidden(headerItems);
if (menu.hasAttribute('data-click-activation')) { // handle click activated toggling
if (hidden) {
hideMenus(); // hide other open menus first
focus();
} else {
unfocus();
}
e.preventDefault();
} else if (hidden) {
hideMenus(); // hide other open menus first
focus();
e.preventDefault(); // prevent 'click' event from firing when menu is hidden
}
};
element.addEventListener('touchend', toggleMenuVisibility);
element.addEventListener('mouseup', toggleMenuVisibility);
// Add hover events to non-click-activated menus, even though CSS should cover it.
if (!menu.hasAttribute('data-click-activation')) {
menu.addEventListener('mouseover', function () {
hideMenus(); // hide other open menus first
focus();
});
menu.addEventListener('mouseout', function (e) {
if (isEventOutsideMenu(e)) {
unfocus();
}
});
}
// Hide menu when child is clicked
menuEntries.forEach(function(menuEntry) {
const linkToItem = function(e) {
if (e.type === 'mousedown' || e.type === 'click') {
e.preventDefault();
return;
}
if (e.type === 'mouseup' && !isLeftClick(e)) {
e.preventDefault();
return;
}
window.open(getLink(menuEntry), (e.ctrlKey || e.metaKey) ? '_blank' : (menuEntry.target || '_self'));
unfocus();
e.preventDefault();
};
const linkToMobileItem = function(e) {
if (e.type === 'touchstart') {
menuEntry.setAttribute('data-touchmove', false);
} else if (e.type === 'touchmove') {
menuEntry.setAttribute('data-touchmove', true);
} else if (e.type === 'touchend' && (!menuEntry.hasAttribute('data-touchmove') || menuEntry.getAttribute('data-touchmove').toLowerCase() === 'false')) {
window.open(getLink(menuEntry), (e.ctrlKey || e.metaKey) ? '_blank' : (menuEntry.target || '_self'));
unfocus();
e.preventDefault();
}
};
menuEntry.addEventListener('mousedown', linkToItem);
menuEntry.addEventListener('mouseup', linkToItem);
menuEntry.addEventListener('click', linkToItem);
menuEntry.addEventListener('touchstart', linkToMobileItem);
menuEntry.addEventListener('touchmove', linkToMobileItem);
menuEntry.addEventListener('touchend', linkToMobileItem);
});
});
function hideIfNonMenuBounds(e) {
if (isEventOutsideMenu(e)) {
hideMenus();
}
}
addEventListener('mousemove', hideIfNonMenuBounds);
addEventListener('touchend', hideIfNonMenuBounds);
addEventListener('mouseup', hideIfNonMenuBounds);
addEventListener('mousedown', hideIfNonMenuBounds);
addEventListener('click', hideIfNonMenuBounds);
}
function handleMobileMenuHeights() {
function setAppHeight() {
document.documentElement.style.setProperty('--app-height', window.innerHeight + 'px');
}
addEventListener('resize', function() {
setAppHeight();
});
setAppHeight();
}
function handleGotoLinks() {
// Add anchor mimicking to elements with data-goto attributes
// This addresses SEO concerns of linking to noindex pages by allowing JS to handle the URL
const anchorElements = document.querySelectorAll('*[data-goto]');
anchorElements.forEach((anchorElement) => {
anchorElement.addEventListener('mouseover', () => {
anchorElement.style.cursor = 'pointer';
anchorElement.style.textDecoration = 'underline';
});
anchorElement.addEventListener('mouseout', () => {
anchorElement.style.cursor = 'unset';
anchorElement.style.textDecoration = 'unset';
});
anchorElement.addEventListener('mouseup', (e) => {
e.preventDefault();
});
anchorElement.addEventListener('mousedown', (e) => {
e.preventDefault();
});
anchorElement.addEventListener('click', (e) => {
e.preventDefault();
const anchorHref = anchorElement.getAttribute('data-goto');
if (anchorElement.hasAttribute('data-new-window') || e.ctrlKey || e.metaKey) {
window.open(anchorHref, '_blank');
} else {
window.open(anchorHref, '_self');
}
});
});
}
</script><script>
const authenticatedBlock = document.querySelector('#authenticated-block');
const unauthenticatedBlock = document.querySelector('#unauthenticated-block');
let authenticated = {
isAuthenticated: false,
isAdmin: false,
user: {
id: null,
name: null,
url: null,
profileImage: null,
}
};
fetch('/services/internal/data/articles-getAuthenticationStatus', {
headers: {
'Accept': 'application/json'
}
})
.then(function (result) {
return result.json()
})
.then(function (result) {
const res = result.result.data
if (!res.authenticated) {
unauthenticatedBlock.classList.add('shown')
} else {
authenticated.user.id = res.id;
authenticated.user.name = res.realName;
authenticated.user.url = res.profileUrl;
authenticated.user.profileImage = res.avatar;
authenticated.user.jobTitle = res.jobTitle;
authenticated.user.companyName = res.companyName;
bindProps('#header-username', null, null, (res.firstName || res.username), null)
bindProps('#header-avatar', null, res.avatar, null, null)
bindProps('#header-user-plug', res.profileUrl, null, res.realName, null)
bindProps('#header-user-edit', '/users/' + res.id + '/edit.html', null, null, null)
bindProps('#header-dropdown-manage-email', '/newsletters/' + res.id + '/manage.html', null, null, null)
bindProps('#dropdown-view-profile', res.profileUrl, null, null, null)
bindProps('#drafts-link', '/users/' + res.id + '/drafts.html', null, null, null)
if (res.isAdmin) {
// Construct backwards so the #after call places elements in the correct order
const firstUserAction = document.querySelector('#first-user-action')
const adminConsoleItem = document.createElement('li')
const adminConsoleLink = createLink('/dzone/staff/index.html', 'Admin Console')
adminConsoleItem.appendChild(adminConsoleLink)
firstUserAction.after(adminConsoleItem)
const moderationItem = document.createElement('li')
const moderationLink = createLink('/moderation/list.html', 'Moderation')
moderationItem.appendChild(moderationLink)
firstUserAction.after(moderationItem)
const bountyModerationItem = document.createElement('li')
const bountyModerationLink = createLink('/moderation/bounties', 'Bounty Moderation')
bountyModerationItem.appendChild(bountyModerationLink)
firstUserAction.after(bountyModerationItem)
}
authenticated.isAuthenticated = res.authenticated;
authenticated.isAdmin = res.isAdmin;
authenticatedBlock.classList.add('shown')
}
}).catch(function (result) {
console.error(result)
})
/**
* Binds different properties to the selected element.
*
* @param selector - Selector to select the element
* @param href - href attribute value
* @param src - src attribute value
* @param innerHTML - innerHTML property value
* @param innerText - innerText property value
*/
function bindProps(selector, href, src, innerHTML, innerText) {
const element = document.querySelector(selector)
if (element) {
if (href) element.href = href
if (src) element.src = src
if (innerHTML) element.innerHTML = innerHTML
if (innerText) element.innerText = innerText
}
}
/**
* Creates a new link element.
*
* @param href - href attribute value
* @param innerText - innerText property value
* @returns {HTMLAnchorElement} The generated link element
*/
function createLink(href, innerText) {
const link = document.createElement('a')
link.href = href
link.innerText = innerText
return link
}
</script><script>
const userHeader = document.querySelector('#user-header')
const userDropdown = document.querySelector('#user-dropdown')
const postDropdown = document.querySelector('#post-button')
const postMenu = document.querySelector('#post-menu')
let userDropdownOpen = false
let postDropdownOpen = false
document.addEventListener('click', function(event) {
if (postDropdown && postDropdown.contains(event.target)) {
setUserDropdown(false)
setPostDropdown(!postDropdownOpen)
} else if (userHeader && userHeader.contains(event.target)) {
setPostDropdown(false)
setUserDropdown(!userDropdownOpen)
} else {
setUserDropdown(false)
setPostDropdown(false)
}
})
function setUserDropdown(value) {
userDropdownOpen = value
if (userDropdownOpen) {
if (userDropdown) {
userDropdown.classList.add('open')
}
} else {
if (userDropdown) {
userDropdown.classList.remove('open')
}
}
}
function setPostDropdown(value) {
postDropdownOpen = value
if (postDropdownOpen) {
if (postMenu) {
postMenu.classList.add('open')
}
} else {
if (postMenu) {
postMenu.classList.remove('open')
}
}
}
</script><script>
document.addEventListener("alpine:init", () => {
Alpine.store('global', {
executeHttp(path, body, method) {
const options = {
method: method,
headers: {
[csrf.header]: csrf.token
}
};
if (method !== 'GET') {
options.body = JSON.stringify(body);
options.headers = {
...options.headers,
'Content-Type': 'application/json; charset=UTF-8'
};
}
return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
fetch(path, options)
.then(res => {
if (!res.ok) {
reject(res);
} else {
resolve(res);
}
})
.catch(err => reject(err));
});
},
getFromService(path) {
return this.executeHttp(path, null, 'GET');
},
postToService(path, body = {}) {
return this.executeHttp(path, body, 'POST');
},
putToService(path, body = {}) {
return this.executeHttp(path, body, 'PUT');
}
});
});
</script>
<link rel="stylesheet" media="all" href="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/ftl/colors.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" media="all" href="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/ftl/article/styles.css">
<div id="body-container">
<div id="announcement-container-outer">
<div id="announcement-previous">
<i class="icon-angle-left"></i>
</div>
<div id="announcement-next">
<i class="icon-angle-right"></i>
</div>
<div id="announcement-container">
<div class="announcement announcement-count-1"
data-position="1">
<div class="body"><p><strong>Could your team report a vulnerability within 24 hours? </strong>Find out on September 23.</p></div>
<div class="spacer"></div>
<a href="https://cvent.me/O32zXR?utm_source=Announcements&amp;utm_medium=DzoneWeb&amp;utm_campaign=QtGroup-0923" target="_blank">
<button>Assess Your CRA Readiness</button>
</a>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript" async>
(function() {
let announcementPosition = 1;
let minAnnouncementPosition = -1;
let maxAnnouncementPosition = -1;
const announcementPrevBtn = document.querySelector('#announcement-previous');
const announcementNextBtn = document.querySelector('#announcement-next');
function withAnnouncements(callback) {
const announcements = document.querySelectorAll('#announcement-container .announcement');
for (let announcement of announcements) {
callback(announcement);
}
}
function initAnnouncementVars() {
document.querySelector(':root').style.setProperty('--mobile-announcement-separator-width', '1px');
withAnnouncements(function(announcement) {
const pos = parseInt(announcement.getAttribute('data-position'));
minAnnouncementPosition = minAnnouncementPosition === -1 ? pos : Math.min(minAnnouncementPosition, pos);
maxAnnouncementPosition = maxAnnouncementPosition === -1 ? pos : Math.max(maxAnnouncementPosition, pos);
});
if (document.querySelector('.announcementBarContainer')) {
document.querySelector(':root').style.setProperty('--body-top-padding', '0');
}
if (maxAnnouncementPosition <= 0) {
document.querySelector(':root').style.setProperty('--body-top-padding', '0');
}
sizeToFullWhenOneEntryOnMobile();
}
function setAnnouncementPosition(position) {
if (window.outerWidth >= 890) {
return; // we do not need to change the position, since we can display everything on desktop.
}
// Make the announcement cyclical
if (minAnnouncementPosition !== -1 && maxAnnouncementPosition !== -1) {
if (position > maxAnnouncementPosition) {
position = minAnnouncementPosition; // overflow to the first announcement
} else if (position < minAnnouncementPosition) {
position = maxAnnouncementPosition; // underflow to the last announcement
}
announcementPosition = position;
}
const shownAnnouncements = [];
let reverseFlex = false; // should only be true when the first and last items are showing
// Now that the position is valid, apply the transforms
withAnnouncements(function(announcement) {
const pos = parseInt(announcement.getAttribute('data-position'));
const isWrapped = position === maxAnnouncementPosition && pos === minAnnouncementPosition; // showing first + last at same time
const doesNextQualify = window.outerWidth >= 500 && (pos === position + 1 || isWrapped);
if (pos === position || doesNextQualify) {
shownAnnouncements.push(announcement);
} else {
announcement.style.display = 'none';
}
announcement.style.opacity = 0.0;
if (isWrapped) {
reverseFlex = true;
}
});
for (let announcement of shownAnnouncements) {
announcement.style.display = 'flex';
announcement.style.opacity = 1.0;
}
const announcementContainer = document.querySelector('#announcement-container');
if (announcementContainer) {
announcementContainer.style.flexDirection = reverseFlex ? 'row-reverse' : 'row';
}
}
function resetAnnouncements() {
announcementPosition = 1;
const announcementContainer = document.querySelector('#announcement-container');
if (announcementContainer) {
announcementContainer.style.flexDirection = 'row';
}
withAnnouncements(function(announcement) {
announcement.style.opacity = 1.0;
announcement.style.display = 'flex';
});
}
function sizeToFullWhenOneEntryOnMobile() {
if (maxAnnouncementPosition <= 2 && announcementPrevBtn && announcementNextBtn) {
announcementPrevBtn.style.display = maxAnnouncementPosition === 2 && window.outerWidth < 500 ? 'flex' : 'none';
announcementNextBtn.style.display = maxAnnouncementPosition === 2 && window.outerWidth < 500 ? 'flex' : 'none';
}
if (maxAnnouncementPosition === 1 && window.outerWidth >= 500 && window.outerWidth < 890) {
document.querySelector(':root').style.setProperty('--mobile-announcement-separator-width', '0');
document.querySelector('#announcement-container .announcement').style.maxWidth = '100%';
}
}
function resetAnnouncementsOnResize() {
announcementPosition = 1; // we want to reset the announcement position every resize
if (window.outerWidth >= 890) { // 4 announcements can be shown (215px * 4) + separator padding
resetAnnouncements();
} else { // if we're still on mobile, set the position to normalize things after resize
setAnnouncementPosition(announcementPosition);
sizeToFullWhenOneEntryOnMobile();
}
}
window.addEventListener('resize', resetAnnouncementsOnResize);
initAnnouncementVars();
setAnnouncementPosition(announcementPosition); // sets the min & max positions as well as initializes transforms
if (announcementPrevBtn) {
announcementPrevBtn.onclick = function() {
setAnnouncementPosition(announcementPosition - 1);
};
}
if (announcementNextBtn) {
announcementNextBtn.onclick = function() {
setAnnouncementPosition(announcementPosition + 1);
};
}
})(); </script>
<div id="ftl-article" class="trending-article-body">
<aside class="trending-sidebar" aria-labelledby="related-sidebar-heading">
<div class="trending">
<h2 id="related-sidebar-heading">Related</h2>
<div class="trending-separator"></div>
<ul>
<li class="item">
<a href="/articles/vector-database-indexing-explained" class="related-link">Vector Database Indexing Explained: Why It Matters More Than the Embeddings Themselves</a>
</li>
<li class="item">
<a href="/articles/the-bill-you-didnt-see-coming" class="related-link">The Bill You Didn't See Coming</a>
</li>
<li class="item">
<a href="/articles/queues-dont-absorb-load-they-delay-bankruptcy-1" class="related-link">Why Queues Don’t Fix Scaling Problems</a>
</li>
<li class="item">
<a href="/articles/dns-propagation-doesnt-take-24-hours" class="related-link">DNS Propagation Doesn't Have to Take 24 Hours</a>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</aside>
<div class="container-fluid body trending-article-fluid">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-12">
<div class="articles-wrap">
<div class="ad-container">
<div id="div-gpt-ad-1435246566686-0" class="ads-billboard-article dz2_article_billboard_new" data-gpt-slot="top"></div>
</div>
<div class="article-stream widget-top-border">
<div class="article-main">
<div class="content-right-images">
<div id="div-gpt-ad-1435246566686-2" class="sidebar-ad dz2_article_halfpage_new" data-gpt-slot="sidebar1"></div>
<div class="trending-separator"></div>
<aside class="trending" aria-labelledby="trending-sidebar-heading">
<h2 id="trending-sidebar-heading">Trending</h2>
<ul>
<li class="item">
<a href="/articles/how-to-submit-a-post-to-dzone" class="trending-link" target="_self">How to Submit a Post to DZone</a>
</li>
<li class="item">
<a href="/articles/dzones-article-submission-guidelines" class="trending-link" target="_self">DZone's Article Submission Guidelines</a>
</li>
<li class="item">
<a href="/articles/llm-java-business-logic" class="trending-link" target="_self">Why I Don't Want an LLM Generating Java Business Logic</a>
</li>
<li class="item">
<a href="/articles/telemetry-volume-noise" class="trending-link" target="_self">Cutting Telemetry Volume Is Not the Same as Cutting Noise</a>
</li>
</ul>
</aside>
</div>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Article",
"headline": "Why Retries Are More Dangerous Than Failures",
"author": [{"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","caption":"David Iyanu Jonathan","url":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e842de66cb81c191bcb029f54ed35baa?d=identicon&r=PG"},"@type":"Person","worksFor":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Jon"},"name":"David Iyanu Jonathan","description":"Technical Content Writer | DevOps, CI/CD, Cloud &amp; Security, Whitepaper.... I’m a results-driven technical content writer with a strong focus on DevOps, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Zero Trust Security, and cloud-native development. I help engineering-led companies and developer tool startups communicate complex ideas in a way that’s accurate, engaging, and conversion-focused.","url":"https://dzone.com/users/5349114/eyanus.html","sameAs":["https://x.com/lyricsdav","https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-david-369176232"]}],
"audience": "software developers",
"keywords": "",
"timeRequired": "PT8M",
"commentCount": 0,
"wordCount": "1978",
"accessMode": "textual, visual",
"datePublished": "2026-02-27T00:00:00Z",
"articleSection": "",
"publisher": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "DZone",
"url": "https://dzone.com",
"logo": {
"@type": "ImageObject",
"url": "https://dzone.com/themes/dz20/images/dz_logo_2021_cropped.png"
}
},
"articleBody": "The instinct is hardwired into every engineer who's shipped production code: if the call fails, try again. It feels responsible — a small buffer against network chaos and flaky backends. But that instinct, unchecked, is how you turn a recoverable hiccup into a four-hour outage that gets the CTO on Slack asking what the hell happened. I've been in the war room when it happens. A service stumbles — maybe a deployment didn't fully bake, maybe the database hit some lock contention — and suddenly every client in the datacenter decides now is the time to demonstrate grit. What was a localized wobble becomes a stampede. The service that was successfully handling 80% of requests gets buried under 300% of normal traffic, nearly all of it retries. Recovery becomes impossible. The system just thrashes, burning CPU to accomplish nothing. This is the thing about retries that takes a while to internalize: they don't fix failures. They multiply them. How the Math Breaks You Run the numbers. You've got a thousand clients talking to a service. Normally, maybe 2% of requests fail — packet loss, transient timeouts, the universe being the universe. Each client retries once. The service sees baseline traffic plus a 2% bump from retries. No problem. Now the service starts struggling. Maybe it's running hot at 90% capacity and response times are climbing. Timeout rate jumps to 20%. Those thousand clients now retry a fifth of their requests. The service, already strained, receives 120% of original volume. But that extra 20% arrives while the service is still trying to chew through the original 100%. Queues back up. More requests time out. Retry rate hits 40%, then 60%. See where this goes? The system enters a state where retries eat all available capacity, starving even the requests that might've succeeded. It's a trap — the harder you struggle, the tighter it clamps down. AWS engineers lived this during an October 2025 database outage. Client apps did exactly what they were supposed to: aggressively retry failed database calls. The database was already wobbly — some internal resource thing, normally the kind of issue that resolves itself in minutes. But those minutes never came. The retry storm kept the system pinned in a failure state for hours. The outage dragged on not because the original problem was catastrophic, but because every well-meaning client was enthusiastically making it worse. The Layer Problem The amplification compounds when you account for the stack. Your application has retry logic. Fair enough. But the HTTP library underneath also retries — you probably didn't configure it, so it's using defaults. That library talks through a load balancer that retries connection failures. Behind that: service mesh, NAT gateway, message queue, each with its own retry semantics. One failure cascades into a dozen actual attempts as it bounces through the layers. I debugged this once where a client was making what looked like reasonable retries — three attempts with exponential backoff. Clean code, good intentions. But the HTTP library was also retrying twice per attempt. And the Kubernetes ingress controller was retrying failed upstream connections. One user request that hit an error became eighteen attempts slamming the backend. We only caught it by instrumenting every single layer and watching the numbers multiply. This is the pattern that kills you: blind retries with no cross-layer coordination. Each component acting locally rational, the aggregate behavior completely insane. What Actually Works (And What Doesn't) You need multiple defenses, and they have to work together. Exponential backoff with jitter isn't optional. First retry after 100ms, second after 200ms, third after 400ms. The jitter — randomizing each delay by ±25% or so — prevents the thundering herd where all clients retry in lockstep. Without jitter, you've built a periodic self-DDoS that hits your own service like a metronome. But backoff alone won't save you. You need circuit breakers — the pattern where after N consecutive failures, you stop trying entirely for some cooldown window. Give the service room to recover. Requests fail fast instead of queuing up. This feels wrong the first time you implement it. You're programming the system to give up. But the alternative — letting it spin uselessly pretending the next retry will work — is worse. Resilience4j and Polly do this well. Istio and Envoy can enforce it at the infrastructure layer, which matters because not every team gets client-side resilience right. Defense in depth. Idempotency is the other foundational piece. If you retry, running the operation five times better produce the same result as running it once. GETs are naturally idempotent. POSTs usually aren't — charging a credit card, firing off an email, incrementing a counter. You need idempotency keys, client-generated request IDs that let the server recognize duplicates. Without this, your retry logic becomes a data corruption engine. I've seen double charges, duplicate emails, inventory counts that drifted further from reality with each retry. Implementation details matter enormously here. HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests) or 503 (Service Unavailable) should trigger backoff, not immediate retry. The Retry-After header tells you explicitly when to try again — actually respect it. A 500 might be transient or might be a bug that'll fail identically every time; you need application context to tell the difference. Some operations shouldn't retry at all. Submitting a job to a queue? The queue provides durability. Retrying the submit just creates duplicate jobs. Writing to a database? The database has its own retry and replication logic. Your application-layer retry might be redundant at best, actively harmful at worst. The Retry Budget SRE teams talk about error budgets — how much failure you can tolerate before breaking SLOs. Same logic applies to retries. You need a retry budget: a system-wide cap on in-flight retries. Harder to implement than it sounds. Requires coordination. Maybe you emit metrics on retry rates and alert when they cross thresholds. Maybe you implement client-side rate limiting that caps total request volume including retries. Maybe the server tracks incoming retry attempts (via request IDs) and starts rejecting when the retry percentage gets too high. The mechanism matters less than the principle: retries can't be unlimited. Queue-based systems have a different flavor of this. Message visibility timeouts determine how long a failed message stays hidden before retrying. Too short and you get a retry storm inside your queue. Too long and legitimate retries get delayed. You're tuning a tradeoff between responsiveness and stability, and the sweet spot depends on your workload — typical processing time, P99 latency, transient failure frequency. When Retries Aren't Enough Uncomfortable question: what happens when the system is genuinely overloaded and backing off won't help? You have to shed load. The server needs to signal \"I cannot handle this\" instead of accepting requests into a bottomless queue. Return errors. Return them fast. Let clients fail quickly and show degraded UI or route to a fallback. This requires killing the instinct to \"handle everything\" — sometimes dropping requests is the right move to keep the system functional for anyone at all. Backpressure goes further. Instead of optimistically accepting work and hoping to catch up, you block at the boundary. TCP does this with sliding windows. Application-level backpressure means refusing to pull messages when your workers are saturated, returning 503s when your connection pool is full. You're deliberately creating a buffer where requests wait instead of executing and failing. These strategies feel harsh when you first ship them. You're choosing who doesn't get served rather than trying to serve everyone badly. But that's the choice distributed systems force. Overload is inevitable. The question is whether you degrade gracefully or collapse spectacularly. You Can't Fix What You Can't See Distributed tracing becomes critical for debugging retry behavior. You need answers to: How many times was this request actually attempted? Where did each retry come from? Which failures were transient versus persistent? Metrics on retry rates, sliced by service and operation, give you early warning. Baseline retry rate is 2%, suddenly it's 15%? Something's wrong. Maybe not wrong enough to trip error rate alerts yet, but wrong enough that you're heading toward a cliff. Latency histograms tell you when saturation is approaching. P99 latency climbing? Retries are about to become a problem — timeouts will spike, triggering more retries, driving latency higher. Catch this feedback loop before it starts. Chaos engineering — deliberately injecting failures — is the only way I've found to actually validate retry policies. In theory your exponential backoff looks great. In practice, under load, with real timeouts and network jitter and queue dynamics, does it prevent retry storms? You won't know until you test it. Kill services. Add latency. Watch what happens to retry rates, error rates, queue depths. Monday Morning Checklist If I were auditing a system's retry behavior — yours, mine, anyone's — here's what I'd check: Can you see retry rates? If not, instrument them. Every outbound request should tag whether it's original or retry. Do your HTTP clients have sneaky default retry logic? Check the docs. Better yet, check actual behavior with a packet capture. I've been surprised. Exponential backoff with jitter? Or are you using fixed delays? Fixed delays are a time bomb. Circuit breakers configured? Do they actually trip or are thresholds so high they only fire when everything's already burning? Are operations idempotent? Can you prove it? Request IDs that survive retries? Do you retry everything or just operations where it makes sense? Retrying writes without idempotency keys? Stop today. Load shedding plan? Do you use 503s with Retry-After? Do clients respect them? The tooling exists — Resilience4j, Polly, Envoy filters. The patterns are documented. This isn't research anymore, it's engineering discipline. The Mercenary Angle Reliability is expensive to achieve and expensive to lose. Companies pay for help. Consulting on resilience engineering — designing retry policies, implementing circuit breakers, running failure injection tests — commands solid rates because getting it wrong costs real money and reputation. Products that simplify this — API gateways with built-in resilience, observability platforms surfacing retry metrics — have genuine market fit. Every microservices shop eventually hits these problems. Training on SRE practices, especially hands-on workshops where you break things in controlled environments, consistently sells out. This knowledge isn't intuitive. It's learned through pain, and organizations would rather pay to compress that learning curve than wait for enough 3am pages. Even narrow offerings — \"we'll audit your retry logic across all services\" — find buyers. Most teams don't have someone thinking deeply about distributed systems failure modes, but increasingly have architectures where those modes matter. The Real Problem Here's the deeper issue: every component in a distributed system acts autonomously with incomplete information. Retries are local decisions. From the client's view, retrying makes sense. From the system's view, coordinated retries during an outage are catastrophic. The fix isn't eliminating retries — you need them. Networks fail, services hiccup, distributed systems require graceful partial failure handling. The fix is making retry behavior aware of global state. Circuit breakers provide that awareness: they let individual clients react to systemic failure by changing behavior. Backoff and jitter provide de-synchronization: they break up coordinated patterns that turn independent actors into a mob. Load shedding provides an escape valve: when coordination isn't enough, you choose degradation over collapse. None of this is conceptually hard. It's just easy to screw up because the failure modes emerge under load, during incidents, when everyone's stressed and visibility is poor and the pressure is \"just make it work.\" That's when unconfigured retry logic that's been sitting quietly for months wakes up and torpedoes you. So you implement these patterns when things are calm. Test them before you need them. Instrument so you can see them working. And you accept that sometimes the right answer is failing fast and explicitly, rather than retrying your way into an outage. That's what separates systems that survive from systems that don't.",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://dzone.com/articles/why-retries-are-more-dangerous-than-failures-2"
},
"image": {
"@type": "ImageObject",
"url": "https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/storage/article-thumb/18896299-thumb.jpg"
}
}
</script>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "BreadcrumbList",
"itemListElement": [
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 1,
"name": "DZone",
"item": "https://dzone.com"
},
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 2,
"name": "Software Design and Architecture",
"item": "https://dzone.com/software-design-and-architecture"
},
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 3,
"name": "Performance",
"item": "https://dzone.com/performance"
},
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 4,
"name": "Why Retries Are More Dangerous Than Failures",
"item": "https://dzone.com/articles/why-retries-are-more-dangerous-than-failures-2"
}
]
}
</script>
<article>
<div class="content">
<div class="header">
<ol class="breadcrumb">
<li class="server"><a href="https://dzone.com">DZone</a></li>
<li class="server"><a href="https://dzone.com/software-design-and-architecture">Software Design and Architecture</a></li>
<li class="server"><a href="https://dzone.com/performance">Performance</a></li>
<li class="active server">Why Retries Are More Dangerous Than Failures</li>
</ol>
<div class="header-title">
<div class="title">
<h1 class="article-title">Why Retries Are More Dangerous Than Failures</h1>
</div>
<div class="subhead">
<p>Retries can amplify failures into outages. Use backoff, circuit breakers, idempotency, load shedding, and observability to keep systems stable under pressure.</p>
</div>
<div class="publish-meta">
By<span style="user-select: none;">&nbsp;</span>
<div class="article-author-meta">
<img src="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/thumbnail?fid=18553685&w=80" class="avatar" alt="David Iyanu Jonathan user avatar" width="40">
<div class="author-info">
<span class="author-name">
<a href="/users/5349114/eyanus.html" rel="nofollow" data-core-user="false">David Iyanu Jonathan</a>
</span>
</div>
&middot;
</div>
<span class="author-date">
Feb. 27, 26
</span>
&middot;
<span>Opinion</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="author-n-useraction">
<div class="like action" x-data="engagementModal(articleId)">
<span id="activity-like-icon" class="dz-like icon-thumbs-up" x-on:click="updateStore()"></span>
<span class="action-label like-text" x-on:click="open()" x-cloak>
<span>Likes</span>
<span id="activity-like-counter" class="like-count">(1)</span>
</span>
<template x-teleport="body">
<div class="engagement-overlay" x-show="$store.article.engagement.open && nodeId === $store.article.id" x-on:keyup.escape.window="close()">
<div class="engagement-modal">
<div class="inner" x-on:click.outside="close()">
<div class="header">
<div class="title">Likes</div>
<button class="close" x-on:click="close()"></button>
</div>
<div class="content">
<div x-show="$store.article.engagement.initializing" class="loading-screen">
<i class="icon icon-spin3 anim-spin"></i>
</div>
<div x-show="!$store.article.engagement.initializing">
<template x-for="user in $store.article.engagement.users" :key="user.id">
<div class="media">
<div class="media-left">
<img class="avatar"
x-bind:src="user.profile.profileImage"
loading="lazy"
width="50"
height="50"
>
</div>
<div class="media-right">
<a x-bind:href="user.computed.url" x-html="user.profile.name"></a>
<div x-show="formatJobData(user)" x-html="formatJobData(user)"></div>
</div>
</div>
</template>
</div>
<div x-show="isDataUnavailable()" class="center-screen">
<div x-show="!$store.article.engagement.unauthorized">
<div>There are no likes...yet! &#128064;</div>
<div>Be the first to like this post!</div>
</div>
<div x-show="$store.article.engagement.unauthorized">
<div>It looks like you're not logged in.</div>
<div><a href="/users/login.html">Sign in</a> to see who liked this post!</div>
</div>
</div>
<div x-show="isFooterShowing()">
<div class="footer">
<button class="btn btn-primary" x-on:click="fetchEngagements()"
x-bind:disabled="$store.article.engagement.loading"
>
Load More
<i x-show="$store.article.engagement.loading" class="icon icon-spin3 anim-spin"></i>
</button>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</template> </div>
<div class="action comment-action">
<span class="comment">
<i class="icon-comment"></i>
<span class="action-label">Comment</span>
<span id="activity-comment-counter" class="comment-count"></span>
</span>
</div>
<div class="save action">
<div id="activity-save-icon" class="save icon-star-empty">
<span id="activity-save-text" class="action-label">Save</span>
</div>
</div>
<div class="tweet action">
<a id="tweet-link" href="" class="title" target="_blank">
<span><i class="icon-twitter"></i></span>
<span class="action-label">Tweet</span>
</a>
</div>
<div class="linkedin action">
<a id="linkedin-link" href="https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https://dzone.com/articles/why-retries-are-more-dangerous-than-failures-2" class="title" target="_blank">
<span><i class="icon-linkedin-1"></i></span>
<span class="action-label">Share</span>
</a>
</div>
<div class="right-most">
<div id="activity-view-container" class="article-views action">
<i class="icon-eye"></i>
<span class="action-label view-count">2.7K Views</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="signin-prompt">
<p>Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.</p>
<a id="article-signin-prompt" href="/static/registration.html">Join For Free</a>
</div>
<div class="arrow-down"></div>
<div id="top-bumper-container"></div>
<div>
<div class="content-html"><p style="text-align: justify;">The instinct is hardwired into every engineer who's shipped production code: if the call fails, try again. It feels responsible — a small buffer against network chaos and flaky backends. But that instinct, unchecked, is how you turn a recoverable hiccup into a four-hour outage that gets the CTO on Slack asking what the hell happened.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">I've been in the war room when it happens. A service stumbles — maybe a deployment didn't fully bake, maybe the database hit some lock contention — and suddenly every client in the datacenter decides now is the time to demonstrate grit. What was a localized wobble becomes a stampede. The service that was successfully handling 80% of requests gets buried under 300% of normal traffic, nearly all of it retries. Recovery becomes impossible. The system just thrashes, burning CPU to accomplish nothing.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This is the thing about retries that takes a while to internalize: they don't fix failures. They multiply them.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;">How the Math Breaks You</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Run the numbers. You've got a thousand clients talking to a service. Normally, maybe 2% of requests fail — packet loss, transient timeouts, the universe being the universe. Each client retries once. The service sees baseline traffic plus a 2% bump from retries. No problem.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Now the service starts struggling. Maybe it's running hot at 90% capacity and response times are climbing. Timeout rate jumps to 20%. Those thousand clients now retry a fifth of their requests. The service, already strained, receives 120% of original volume. But that extra 20% arrives <em>while the service is still trying to chew through the original 100%</em>. Queues back up. More requests time out. Retry rate hits 40%, then 60%.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">See where this goes?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The system enters a state where retries eat all available capacity, starving even the requests that might've succeeded. It's a trap — the harder you struggle, the tighter it clamps down.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">AWS engineers lived this during an October 2025 database outage. Client apps did exactly what they were supposed to: aggressively retry failed database calls. The database was already wobbly — some internal resource thing, normally the kind of issue that resolves itself in minutes. But those minutes never came. The retry storm kept the system pinned in a failure state for hours. The outage dragged on not because the original problem was catastrophic, but because every well-meaning client was enthusiastically making it worse.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;">The Layer Problem</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The amplification compounds when you account for the stack. Your application has retry logic. Fair enough. But the HTTP library underneath <em>also</em> retries — you probably didn't configure it, so it's using defaults. That library talks through a load balancer that retries connection failures. Behind that: service mesh, NAT gateway, message queue, each with its own retry semantics.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">One failure cascades into a dozen actual attempts as it bounces through the layers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">I debugged this once where a client was making what looked like reasonable retries — three attempts with exponential backoff. Clean code, good intentions. But the HTTP library was <em>also</em> retrying twice per attempt. And the <a href="https://dzone.com/articles/demystifying-kubernetes">Kubernetes</a> ingress controller was retrying failed upstream connections. One user request that hit an error became eighteen attempts slamming the backend. We only caught it by instrumenting every single layer and watching the numbers multiply.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This is the pattern that kills you: <strong>blind retries with no cross-layer coordination</strong>. Each component acting locally rational, the aggregate behavior completely insane.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;">What Actually Works (And What Doesn't)</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">You need multiple defenses, and they have to work together.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Exponential backoff with jitter</strong> isn't optional. First retry after 100ms, second after 200ms, third after 400ms. The jitter — randomizing each delay by ±25% or so — prevents the thundering herd where all clients retry in lockstep. Without jitter, you've built a periodic self-DDoS that hits your own service like a metronome.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">But backoff alone won't save you. You need <strong>circuit breakers&nbsp;</strong>— the pattern where after N consecutive failures, you stop trying entirely for some cooldown window. Give the service room to recover. Requests fail fast instead of queuing up. This feels wrong the first time you implement it. You're programming the system to give up. But the alternative — letting it spin uselessly pretending the next retry will work — is worse.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Resilience4j and Polly do this well. Istio and Envoy can enforce it at the infrastructure layer, which matters because not every team gets client-side resilience right. Defense in depth.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Idempotency</strong> is the other foundational piece. If you retry, running the operation five times better produce the same result as running it once. GETs are naturally idempotent. POSTs usually aren't — charging a credit card, firing off an email, incrementing a counter. You need <a href="https://dzone.com/articles/importance-of-idempotency-in-distributed-systems">idempotency keys</a>, client-generated request IDs that let the server recognize duplicates. Without this, your retry logic becomes a data corruption engine. I've seen double charges, duplicate emails, inventory counts that drifted further from reality with each retry.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Implementation details matter enormously here. HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests) or 503 (Service Unavailable) should trigger backoff, not immediate retry. The <code>Retry-After</code> header tells you explicitly when to try again — actually respect it. A 500 might be transient or might be a bug that'll fail identically every time; you need application context to tell the difference.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Some operations shouldn't retry at all. Submitting a job to a queue? The queue provides durability. Retrying the submit just creates duplicate jobs. Writing to a database? The database has its own retry and replication logic. Your application-layer retry might be redundant at best, actively harmful at worst.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;">The Retry Budget</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">SRE teams talk about error budgets — how much failure you can tolerate before breaking SLOs. Same logic applies to retries. You need a <strong>retry budget</strong>: a system-wide cap on in-flight retries.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Harder to implement than it sounds. Requires coordination. Maybe you emit metrics on retry rates and alert when they cross thresholds. Maybe you implement client-side rate limiting that caps total request volume including retries. Maybe the server tracks incoming retry attempts (via request IDs) and starts rejecting when the retry percentage gets too high.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The mechanism matters less than the principle: retries can't be unlimited.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Queue-based systems have a different flavor of this. Message visibility timeouts determine how long a failed message stays hidden before retrying. Too short and you get a retry storm inside your queue. Too long and legitimate retries get delayed. You're tuning a tradeoff between responsiveness and stability, and the sweet spot depends on your workload — typical processing time, P99 latency, transient failure frequency.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;">When Retries Aren't Enough</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Uncomfortable question: what happens when the system is genuinely overloaded and backing off won't help?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">You have to <strong>shed load</strong>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The server needs to signal "I cannot handle this" instead of accepting requests into a bottomless queue. Return errors. Return them fast. Let clients fail quickly and show degraded UI or route to a fallback. This requires killing the instinct to "handle everything" — sometimes dropping requests is the right move to keep the system functional for anyone at all.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Backpressure goes further. Instead of optimistically accepting work and hoping to catch up, you block at the boundary. TCP does this with sliding windows. Application-level backpressure means refusing to pull messages when your workers are saturated, returning 503s when your connection pool is full. You're deliberately creating a buffer where requests wait instead of executing and failing.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">These strategies feel harsh when you first ship them. You're choosing who doesn't get served rather than trying to serve everyone badly. But that's the choice distributed systems force. Overload is inevitable. The question is whether you degrade gracefully or collapse spectacularly.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;">You Can't Fix What You Can't See</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Distributed tracing becomes critical for debugging retry behavior. You need answers to: How many times was this request actually attempted? Where did each retry come from? Which failures were transient versus persistent?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Metrics on retry rates, sliced by service and operation, give you early warning. Baseline retry rate is 2%, suddenly it's 15%? Something's wrong. Maybe not wrong enough to trip error rate alerts yet, but wrong enough that you're heading toward a cliff.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Latency histograms tell you when saturation is approaching. P99 latency climbing? Retries are about to become a problem — timeouts will spike, triggering more retries, driving latency higher. Catch this feedback loop before it starts.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Chaos engineering — deliberately injecting failures — is the only way I've found to actually validate retry policies. In theory your exponential backoff looks great. In practice, under load, with real timeouts and network jitter and queue dynamics, does it prevent retry storms? You won't know until you test it. Kill services. Add latency. Watch what happens to retry rates, error rates, queue depths.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;">Monday Morning Checklist</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">If I were auditing a system's retry behavior — yours, mine, anyone's — here's what I'd check:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Can you see retry rates? If not, instrument them. Every outbound request should tag whether it's original or retry.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Do your HTTP clients have sneaky default retry logic? Check the docs. Better yet, check actual behavior with a packet capture. I've been surprised.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Exponential backoff with jitter? Or are you using fixed delays? Fixed delays are a time bomb.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Circuit breakers configured? Do they actually trip or are thresholds so high they only fire when everything's already burning?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Are operations idempotent? Can you prove it? Request IDs that survive retries?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Do you retry everything or just operations where it makes sense? Retrying writes without idempotency keys? Stop today.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Load shedding plan? Do you use 503s with Retry-After? Do clients respect them?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The tooling exists — Resilience4j, Polly, Envoy filters. The patterns are documented. This isn't research anymore, it's engineering discipline.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;">The Mercenary Angle</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Reliability is expensive to achieve and expensive to lose. Companies pay for help.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Consulting on resilience engineering — designing retry policies, implementing circuit breakers, running failure injection tests — commands solid rates because getting it wrong costs real money and reputation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Products that simplify this — API gateways with built-in resilience, observability platforms surfacing retry metrics — have genuine market fit. Every <a href="https://dzone.com/articles/microservices-design-patterns-for-high-resiliency">microservices</a> shop eventually hits these problems.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Training on SRE practices, especially hands-on workshops where you break things in controlled environments, consistently sells out. This knowledge isn't intuitive. It's learned through pain, and organizations would rather pay to compress that learning curve than wait for enough 3am pages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Even narrow offerings — "we'll audit your retry logic across all services" — find buyers. Most teams don't have someone thinking deeply about distributed systems failure modes, but increasingly have architectures where those modes matter.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;">The Real Problem</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Here's the deeper issue: every component in a distributed system acts autonomously with incomplete information. Retries are local decisions. From the client's view, retrying makes sense. From the system's view, coordinated retries during an outage are catastrophic.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The fix isn't eliminating retries — you need them. Networks fail, services hiccup, distributed systems require graceful partial failure handling. The fix is making retry behavior aware of global state. Circuit breakers provide that awareness: they let individual clients react to systemic failure by changing behavior.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Backoff and jitter provide de-synchronization: they break up coordinated patterns that turn independent actors into a mob.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Load shedding provides an escape valve: when coordination isn't enough, you choose degradation over collapse.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">None of this is conceptually hard. It's just easy to screw up because the failure modes emerge under load, during incidents, when everyone's stressed and visibility is poor and the pressure is "just make it work." That's when unconfigured retry logic that's been sitting quietly for months wakes up and torpedoes you.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">So you implement these patterns when things are calm. Test them before you need them. Instrument so you can see them working.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">And you accept that sometimes the right answer is failing fast and explicitly, rather than retrying your way into an outage.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">That's what separates systems that survive from systems that don't.</p></div>
</div>
<div id="bottom-bumper-container"></div>
<div class="article-tag-pill-container">
<span class="article-tag-pill">Chaos engineering</span>
<span class="article-tag-pill">Database</span>
<span class="article-tag-pill">IT</span>
<span class="article-tag-pill">Site reliability engineering</span>
</div>
<div class="attribution">
<p>Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.</p>
</div>
</div>
</article>
</div>
<div class="trending-separator goto"></div>
<aside class="trending goto" aria-labelledby="related-mobile-heading">
<h2 id="related-mobile-heading">Related</h2>
<ul>
<li class="item">
<a href="/articles/vector-database-indexing-explained" class="goto-link related-link">Vector Database Indexing Explained: Why It Matters More Than the Embeddings Themselves</a>
</li>
<li class="item">
<a href="/articles/the-bill-you-didnt-see-coming" class="goto-link related-link">The Bill You Didn't See Coming</a>
</li>
<li class="item">
<a href="/articles/queues-dont-absorb-load-they-delay-bankruptcy-1" class="goto-link related-link">Why Queues Don’t Fix Scaling Problems</a>
</li>
<li class="item">
<a href="/articles/dns-propagation-doesnt-take-24-hours" class="goto-link related-link">DNS Propagation Doesn't Have to Take 24 Hours</a>
</li>
</ul>
</aside>
</div>
<div id="div-gpt-ad-1435246566686-11" class="ads-bottom-leaderboard dz2_article_bottom" data-gpt-slot="bottom"></div>
<div class="layout-card widget-top-border partner-resources-block" style="width:100%; margin-bottom: 1em;">
<div class="main-container">
<div class="featured-header">
<h2>
<span>Partner Resources</span>
</h2>
</div>
<div class="partner-resources-container">
<div id="div-gpt-ad-1435246566686-5" class="resource-block dz2_partner_resource_link" data-gpt-slot="partner" data-gpt-position="pr1"></div>
<div id="div-gpt-ad-1435246566686-6" class="resource-block dz2_partner_resource_link" data-gpt-slot="partner" data-gpt-position="pr2"></div>
<div id="div-gpt-ad-1435246566686-7" class="resource-block dz2_partner_resource_link" data-gpt-slot="partner" data-gpt-position="pr3"></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="bottom-sticky-ad-container">
<span class="bottom-sticky-ad-close" title="close"
x-on:click="$el.parentElement.classList.add('closed')">×</span>
<div id="div-gpt-ad-1635294790718-12" class="bottom-sticky-ad dz2_sticky_footer_leaderboard" data-gpt-slot="bottomStickyFooter"></div>
</div>
<div class="modal fade bd-example-modal-lg" id="modal-message" tabindex="-1" role="dialog" aria-hidden="true">
<div class="modal-dialog">
<div class="modal-content">
<div class="modal-header"></div>
<div class="modal-body"></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="comments-overlay"></div>
<div id="comment-box">
<div class="comment-box-wrapper">
<div id="comment-input-editor"></div>
</div>
<div class="info hidden"></div>
<div class="comments-content" style="display: none;">
<div class="comment-header">
<hr />
<span class="icon-comment">
<span class="numOfComments"></span> Comments
</span>
</div>
<div class="comments"></div>
</div>
</div>
<script async>var articleTitle = 'Why Retries Are More Dangerous Than Failures';
var articleUrl = 'https://dzone.com/articles/why-retries-are-more-dangerous-than-failures-2';
var retweetLink = document.querySelector('#tweet-link');
function retweet(event) {
event.preventDefault();
event.stopPropagation();
var twitter = 'https://twitter.com/intent/tweet';
var params = '?text=' + encodeURIComponent(articleTitle) + '&url=' + articleUrl + '&ref=dzone.com&via=DZoneInc';
var win = window.open(twitter + params, '_blank');
win.focus();
}
retweetLink.addEventListener('click', retweet);
function showStatusMessage(options) {
var modal = document.getElementById('modal-message');
if(modal) {
modal.classList.add(options.type);
var modalBody = modal.querySelector('.modal-content .modal-body');
var modalHeader = modal.querySelector('.modal-content .modal-header');
modalHeader.innerText = options.header ? options.header : '';
modalBody.innerText = options.body ? options.body : '';
$(modal).modal('show');
$(modal).on('hidden.bs.modal', function () {
modal.classList.remove(options.type);
});
}
}
function showConfirmMessage(options) {
var modal = document.getElementById('modal-message');
if(modal) {
modal.classList.add(options.type);
var modalBody = modal.querySelector('.modal-content .modal-body');
var modalHeader = modal.querySelector('.modal-content .modal-header');
modalHeader.innerText = options.header ? options.header : '';
modalBody.innerText = options.body ? options.body : '';
if (options.textarea) {
var textareaDiv = document.createElement('div');
var textareaLabel = document.createElement('label');
textareaLabel.setAttribute('for', 'modal-textarea');
textareaLabel.innerText = options.textarea.label;
var textarea = document.createElement('textarea');
textarea.id = 'modal-textarea';
textarea.placeholder = (options.textarea.placeholder || '');
textarea.setAttribute('rows', (options.textarea.rows || 3));
textarea.classList.add('form-control', 'not-resizable');
if (options.textarea.maxlength) {
textarea.maxLength = options.textarea.maxlength;
}
textareaDiv.appendChild(textareaLabel);
textareaDiv.appendChild(textarea);
modalBody.appendChild(textareaDiv);
}
var btnContainer = document.createElement('div');
btnContainer.classList.add('btn-container');
var noBtn = document.createElement('button');
noBtn.innerText = options.noBtnText ? options.noBtnText : 'No';
noBtn.classList.add('no-btn');
var yesBtn = document.createElement('button');
yesBtn.innerText = options.yesBtnText ? options.yesBtnText : 'Yes';
yesBtn.classList.add('yes-btn');
btnContainer.appendChild(noBtn);
btnContainer.appendChild(yesBtn);
modalBody.appendChild(btnContainer);
$(modal).modal('show');
$(noBtn).one('click', function() {
$(modal).modal('hide');
if(options.noCallback) {
$(modal).one('hidden.bs.modal', function () {
options.noCallback();
});
}
});
$(yesBtn).one('click', function() {
$(modal).modal('hide');
if(options.yesCallback) {
$(modal).one('hidden.bs.modal', function () {
options.yesCallback();
});
}
});
$(modal).on('hidden.bs.modal', function () {
modal.classList.remove(options.type);
});
}
}
function getSuspensionBody() {
return 'We regret to inform you that your DZone account has been suspended for violating our Guidelines. ' +
'Please reach out to editors@dzone.com if you would like additional information.';
}</script>
<style>.engagement-overlay {
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
position: fixed;
top: 0;
left: 0;
background: rgb(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
z-index: 10000;
}
.engagement-modal {
display: flex;
align-items: center;
justify-content: center;
position: fixed;
z-index: 10;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
}
.engagement-modal .inner {
background-color: white;
border-radius: 0.5em;
margin: auto;
border: 1px solid #cccccc;
}
.engagement-modal .header {
padding: 20px 50px 10px 30px;
position: relative;
}
.engagement-modal .title {
font-size: 20px;
font-weight: bold;
color: #333333;
}
.engagement-modal .title:hover {
text-decoration: none;
}
.engagement-modal .close {
font-size: 18px;
position: absolute;
top: 18px;
right: 20px;
width: 32px;
height: 32px;
background: none;
border: none;
opacity: 0.8;
font-weight: bold;
text-shadow: 0 1px 0 #fff;
}
.engagement-modal .close:hover {
background-color: rgba(146, 148, 151, 0.2);
color: #000;
border-radius: 50%;
}
.engagement-modal .close:after {
content: '\2715';
}
.engagement-modal .content {
padding: 0 30px 20px;
width: min(450px, 90vw);
height: min(450px, 90vw);
scrollbar-width: thin;
overflow: auto;
overscroll-behavior: contain;
}
.engagement-modal .loading-screen,
.engagement-modal .content .center-screen {
display: flex;
justify-content: center;
align-items: center;
height: 100%;
font-size: 18px;
}
.engagement-modal .content .center-screen a {
color: var(--acc-ffffff-blue-1);
font-weight: bold;
}
.engagement-modal .loading-screen i {
font-size: 24px;
}
.engagement-modal .media-left,
.engagement-modal .media-right {
display: table-cell;
vertical-align: top;
}
.engagement-modal .media-left {
padding-right: 10px;
}
.engagement-modal .media-right {
padding-left: 10px;
}
.engagement-modal .media a {
color: black;
font-size: 16px;
}
.engagement-modal .avatar {
border-radius: 50%;
}
.engagement-modal .footer {
margin: 20px 0 0;
display: flex;
justify-content: center;
align-items: center;
background-color: unset !important;
border-top: none !important;
}
.engagement-modal .footer .btn {
border: 1px solid transparent;
}
.engagement-modal .footer .btn-primary {
color: #fff;
border-color: #2e6da4;
}
.engagement-modal .footer button {
background-color: var(--acc-ffffff-blue-2);
padding: 6px 12px;
border-radius: 4px;
}
.engagement-modal .footer button:hover {
filter: brightness(1.2);
}
@keyframes anim-spin {
0% {
transform: rotate(0deg);
}
100% {
transform: rotate(359deg);
}
}
.engagement-modal .anim-spin {
display: inline-block;
animation: anim-spin 2s infinite linear;
}</style>
<script>document.addEventListener('alpine:init', () => {
Alpine.data('engagementModal', (nodeId) => ({
nodeId: null,
init() {
this.nodeId = nodeId;
},
open() {
this.updateStore();
this.$store.article.engagement.open = true;
if (this.$store.article.engagement.page === 1 && !this.$store.article.engagement.unauthorized) {
this.$store.article.engagement.initializing = true;
this.fetchEngagements();
}
},
close() {
if (this.$store.article.engagement.open) {
this.$store.article.engagement.open = false;
}
},
updateStore() {
if (this.nodeId !== this.$store.article.id) {
this.$store.article.engagement.reset();
this.$store.article.id = this.nodeId;
}
},
fetchEngagements() {
if (this.$store.article.engagement.loading || !this.$store.article.engagement.additional) {
return;
}
this.$store.article.engagement.loading = true;
this.$store.global.getFromService('/services/nodes/' + this.$store.article.id + '/engagements?page=' + this.$store.article.engagement.page)
.then(res => {
res.json().then(data => {
for (let user of data.engagements) {
this.$store.article.engagement.users.push(user);
}
this.$store.article.engagement.additional = data.additional;
this.$store.article.engagement.page++;
});
})
.catch(err => {
err.json().then(data => {
if (data.error?.code === 4011) {
this.$store.article.engagement.unauthorized = true;
} else {
this.$store.modal_engagement_error.open();
}
});
})
.finally(() => {
// Allow the loader to gracefully exit
setTimeout(() => {
this.$store.article.engagement.loading = false;
this.$store.article.engagement.initializing = false;
}, 200);
});
},
formatJobData(user) {
if (user.profile.jobTitle && user.profile.companyName) {
return user.profile.jobTitle + ', ' + user.profile.companyName;
}
if (user.profile.jobTitle) {
return user.profile.jobTitle;
}
if (user.profile.companyName) {
return user.profile.companyName;
}
return null;
},
isDataUnavailable() {
return !this.$store.article.engagement.initializing && !this.$store.article.engagement.users.length;
},
isFooterShowing() {
return !this.$store.article.engagement.initializing
&& this.$store.article.engagement.additional
&& this.$store.article.engagement.page > 1;
}
}));
});
</script>
<div class="alpine-overlay" x-cloak x-show="$store.modal_engagement_error._open">
<div id="modal_engagement_error"
class="alpine-modal"
role="dialog"
tabindex="-1"
x-show="$store.modal_engagement_error._open"
x-on:click.self="$store.modal_engagement_error.dismissible && $store.modal_engagement_error.close()"
x-cloak
x-transition
>
<div class="dz-style modal-inner centered relative">
<button x-show="$store.modal_engagement_error.closeable"
class="btn-close"
x-on:click="$store.modal_engagement_error.close()"
aria-label="Close">
</button>
<div x-show="$store.modal_engagement_error.title" class="modal-header p-sm mt-sm mb-md">
<div class="title " x-text="$store.modal_engagement_error.title"></div>
</div>
<div class="modal-content py-md px-lg" x-bind:class="{ 'has-top-border': $store.modal_engagement_error.title }">
<p x-show="$store.modal_engagement_error.bodyText" class="my-none" x-text="$store.modal_engagement_error.bodyText"></p>
<p>The likes didn't load as expected. Please refresh the page and try again.</p>
</div>
<div x-show="$store.modal_engagement_error.options.length" class="modal-footer p-sm">
<template x-for="option in $store.modal_engagement_error.options">
<button x-show="option.canDisplay" x-text="option.text"
type="button"
x-bind:id="'button_modal_engagement_error_' + option.index"
x-bind:class="option.classList"
x-on:click="option.onClick"
x-bind:disabled="option.isDisabled"
></button>
</template>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<script>
document.addEventListener("alpine:init", () => {
Alpine.store("modal_engagement_error", {
_open: false,
title: "Oops! Something Went Wrong",
bodyText: null,
options: [{"action":"dismiss","text":"Close"}],
closeable: true,
dismissible: true,
open(data) {
if (data) {
if (data.title) {
this.title = data.title;
}
if (data.bodyText) {
this.bodyText = data.bodyText;
}
if (data.options) {
this.options = data.options;
}
if (data.dismissAfterMs) {
setTimeout(() => this._open = false, data.dismissAfterMs);
}
}
this.updateOptions();
this._open = true;
},
close() {
// Manually click the buttons in which should run on dismiss.
// This is to keep the context. Calling this[option.action]() will not work.
for (let option of this.options) {
if (option.runOnDismiss) {
const element = document.querySelector('#button_modal_engagement_error_' + option.index);
element.click();
}
}
this._open = false;
},
updateOptions() {
const btnStyle = this.options.length === 2 ? ' btn-default' : '';
this.options = this.options.map((o, idx) => ({
...o,
index: idx,
classList: o.classList ? o.classList : (idx === 0 ? "btn btn-primary hov-brighten" : "btn hov-underline" + btnStyle),
onClick: function() {
if (o.action !== "dismiss") {
this[o.action]();
}
this.$store["modal_engagement_error"].close();
},
isDisabled: function() {
return Object.hasOwn(o, 'disabled') && this[o.disabled]();
},
canDisplay: function() {
return !Object.hasOwn(o, 'condition') || this[o.condition]();
}
}));
},
init() {
this.updateOptions();
}
});
});
</script>
<link rel="stylesheet" media="all" href="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/ftl/footer/styles.css">
<div id="ftl-footer">
<div class="container-fluid footerOuter" style="padding-bottom: 90px;">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-12">
<div class="container">
<div class="row footer">
<div class="col-md-12 footerWidget">
<div class="row footerContainer footer">
<div class="left col-xs-12 col-sm-7">
<div class="col-xs-12 social-media-icons footer-mobile">
<ul class="icons-only">
<li class="rss-icon" id="rss-footer-1">
<a href="/pages/feeds" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">
<svg role="img" viewBox="0 0 24 24" class="w-4 h-4 mt-1.75 fill-current" aria-label="Follow our RSS feeds">
<title>RSS</title>
<path d="M19.199 24C19.199 13.467 10.533 4.8 0 4.8V0c13.165 0 24 10.835 24 24h-4.801zM3.291 17.415c1.814 0 3.293 1.479 3.293 3.295 0 1.813-1.485 3.29-3.301 3.29C1.47 24 0 22.526 0 20.71s1.475-3.294 3.291-3.295zM15.909 24h-4.665c0-6.169-5.075-11.245-11.244-11.245V8.09c8.727 0 15.909 7.184 15.909 15.91z"></path>
</svg>
</a>
</li>
<li class="twitter-icon">
<a href="https://twitter.com/DZoneInc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">
<svg role="img" viewBox="0 0 24 24" aria-label="Follow us on X">
<title>X</title>
<path d="M14.234 10.162 22.977 0h-2.072l-7.591 8.824L7.251 0H.258l9.168 13.343L.258 24H2.33l8.016-9.318L16.749 24h6.993zm-2.837 3.299-.929-1.329L3.076 1.56h3.182l5.965 8.532.929 1.329 7.754 11.09h-3.182z"></path>
</svg>
</a>
</li>
<li class="facebook-icon">
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/DZoneInc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">
<svg role="img" viewBox="0 0 24 24" aria-label="Follow us on Facebook">
<title>Facebook</title>
<path d="M9.101 23.691v-7.98H6.627v-3.667h2.474v-1.58c0-4.085 1.848-5.978 5.858-5.978.401 0 .955.042 1.468.103a8.68 8.68 0 0 1 1.141.195v3.325a8.623 8.623 0 0 0-.653-.036 26.805 26.805 0 0 0-.733-.009c-.707 0-1.259.096-1.675.309a1.686 1.686 0 0 0-.679.622c-.258.42-.374.995-.374 1.752v1.297h3.919l-.386 2.103-.287 1.564h-3.246v8.245C19.396 23.238 24 18.179 24 12.044c0-6.627-5.373-12-12-12s-12 5.373-12 12c0 5.628 3.874 10.35 9.101 11.647Z"></path>
</svg>
</a>
</li>
<li class="linkedin-icon">
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/dzone/" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener">
<svg viewBox="0 0 24 25" fill="none" aria-label="Follow us on LinkedIn">
<path d="M6.20062 21.2143H1.84688V7.194H6.20062V21.2143ZM4.02141 5.2815C2.62922 5.2815 1.5 4.12838 1.5 2.73619C1.5 2.06747 1.76565 1.42614 2.2385 0.953285C2.71136 0.48043 3.35269 0.214783 4.02141 0.214783C4.69012 0.214783 5.33145 0.48043 5.80431 0.953285C6.27716 1.42614 6.54281 2.06747 6.54281 2.73619C6.54281 4.12838 5.413 5.2815 4.02141 5.2815ZM22.4953 21.2143H18.1509V14.3893C18.1509 12.7628 18.1181 10.6768 15.8873 10.6768C13.6237 10.6768 13.2769 12.444 13.2769 14.2721V21.2143H8.92781V7.194H13.1034V9.1065H13.1644C13.7456 8.00494 15.1655 6.84244 17.2838 6.84244C21.69 6.84244 22.5 9.744 22.5 13.5128V21.2143H22.4953Z" fill="currentColor"></path>
</svg>
</a>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="top-section col-xs-12">
<div class="col-xs-12 col-sm-6">
<p class="section-header">ABOUT US</p>
<ul class="link-group">
<li><a href="/pages/about" rel="noreferrer noopener">About DZone</a></li>
<li><a href="/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#bccfc9ccccd3cec8fcd8c6d3d2d992dfd3d1" rel="noreferrer noopener">Support and feedback</a></li>
<li><a href="/pages/dzone-community-research">Community research</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="col-xs-12 col-sm-6">
<p class="section-header">ADVERTISE</p>
<ul class="link-group">
<li><a href="https://advertise.dzone.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Advertise with DZone</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<div class="bottom-section col-xs-12">
<div class="col-xs-12 col-sm-6">
<p class="section-header">CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE</p>
<ul class="bottom-top-list link-group">
<li><a href="/articles/dzones-article-submission-guidelines">Article Submission Guidelines</a></li>
<li><a href="/pages/contribute" rel="noreferrer noopener">Become a Contributor</a></li>
<li><a href="/pages/core" rel="noreferrer noopener">Core Program</a></li>
<li><a href="/writers-zone" rel="noreferrer noopener">Visit the Writers' Zone</a></li>
</ul>
<p class="section-header">LEGAL</p>
<ul class="link-group">
<li><a href="https://technologyadvice.com/terms-conditions/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Terms of Service</a></li>
<li><a href="https://technologyadvice.com/privacy-policy/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Privacy Policy</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="col-xs-12 col-sm-6">
<p class="section-header">CONTACT US</p>
<ul class="link-group">
<li>3343 Perimeter Hill Drive</li>
<li>Suite 215</li>
<li>Nashville, TN 37211</li>
<li><a href="/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#b6c5c3c6c6d9c4c2f6d2ccd9d8d398d5d9db" rel="noreferrer noopener"><span class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="0d7e787d7d627f794d6977626368236e6260">[email&#160;protected]</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="right col-xs-12 col-sm-5">
<p class="connect-text">Let's be friends:</p>
<div class="col-xs-12 social-media-icons footer-wide">
<ul class="icons-only">
<li class="rss-icon" id="rss-footer-1">
<a href="/pages/feeds" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">
<svg role="img" viewBox="0 0 24 24" aria-label="Follow our RSS feeds">
<title>RSS</title>
<path d="M19.199 24C19.199 13.467 10.533 4.8 0 4.8V0c13.165 0 24 10.835 24 24h-4.801zM3.291 17.415c1.814 0 3.293 1.479 3.293 3.295 0 1.813-1.485 3.29-3.301 3.29C1.47 24 0 22.526 0 20.71s1.475-3.294 3.291-3.295zM15.909 24h-4.665c0-6.169-5.075-11.245-11.244-11.245V8.09c8.727 0 15.909 7.184 15.909 15.91z"></path>
</svg>
</a>
</li>
<li class="twitter-icon">
<a href="https://twitter.com/DZoneInc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">
<svg role="img" viewBox="0 0 24 24" aria-label="Follow us on X">
<title>X</title>
<path d="M14.234 10.162 22.977 0h-2.072l-7.591 8.824L7.251 0H.258l9.168 13.343L.258 24H2.33l8.016-9.318L16.749 24h6.993zm-2.837 3.299-.929-1.329L3.076 1.56h3.182l5.965 8.532.929 1.329 7.754 11.09h-3.182z"></path>
</svg>
</a>
</li>
<li class="facebook-icon">
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/DZoneInc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">
<svg role="img" viewBox="0 0 24 24" aria-label="Follow us on Facebook">
<title>Facebook</title>
<path d="M9.101 23.691v-7.98H6.627v-3.667h2.474v-1.58c0-4.085 1.848-5.978 5.858-5.978.401 0 .955.042 1.468.103a8.68 8.68 0 0 1 1.141.195v3.325a8.623 8.623 0 0 0-.653-.036 26.805 26.805 0 0 0-.733-.009c-.707 0-1.259.096-1.675.309a1.686 1.686 0 0 0-.679.622c-.258.42-.374.995-.374 1.752v1.297h3.919l-.386 2.103-.287 1.564h-3.246v8.245C19.396 23.238 24 18.179 24 12.044c0-6.627-5.373-12-12-12s-12 5.373-12 12c0 5.628 3.874 10.35 9.101 11.647Z"></path>
</svg>
</a>
</li>
<li class="linkedin-icon">
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/dzone/" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener">
<svg viewBox="0 0 24 25" fill="none" aria-label="Follow us on LinkedIn">
<path d="M6.20062 21.2143H1.84688V7.194H6.20062V21.2143ZM4.02141 5.2815C2.62922 5.2815 1.5 4.12838 1.5 2.73619C1.5 2.06747 1.76565 1.42614 2.2385 0.953285C2.71136 0.48043 3.35269 0.214783 4.02141 0.214783C4.69012 0.214783 5.33145 0.48043 5.80431 0.953285C6.27716 1.42614 6.54281 2.06747 6.54281 2.73619C6.54281 4.12838 5.413 5.2815 4.02141 5.2815ZM22.4953 21.2143H18.1509V14.3893C18.1509 12.7628 18.1181 10.6768 15.8873 10.6768C13.6237 10.6768 13.2769 12.444 13.2769 14.2721V21.2143H8.92781V7.194H13.1034V9.1065H13.1644C13.7456 8.00494 15.1655 6.84244 17.2838 6.84244C21.69 6.84244 22.5 9.744 22.5 13.5128V21.2143H22.4953Z" fill="currentColor"></path>
</svg>
</a>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<script data-cfasync="false" src="/cdn-cgi/scripts/5c5dd728/cloudflare-static/email-decode.min.js"></script><script>
const articleId = 3635789;
const likes = 1;
const assetDomain = 'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com';
const codemirrorVars = {
modeURI: 'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/lib/codemirror/mode/',
requiredScripts: [
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/lib/codemirror/lib/codemirror.js',
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/lib/codemirror/addon/mode/overlay.js',
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/lib/codemirror/addon/mode/multiplex.js',
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/lib/codemirror/mode/meta.js'
]
};
const gptTags = {
'zone': 'Performance',
'topicTag': 'Chaos engineering,Database,IT,Site reliability engineering',
'company': '',
'siteSection': 'Zones',
'articleCategory': 'opinion',
'nodeID': '3635789',
'authorID': '5349114',
'publishYear': '2026',
'publishMonth': '02',
'jobRole': '',
'companySize': '',
'env': 'prod'
};
const minCommentChar = 10;
</script>
<script async>const width = window.innerWidth;
const metadata = {
'top': {
'position': 'top',
'slot': 'dz2_article_billboard_new',
},
'sponsorLogo': {
'position': 'zoneHomepage',
'slot': 'dz2_homepage_sponsor_logo',
'refreshable': false
},
'sidebar1': {
'position': 'sidebar',
'slot': 'dz2_article_halfpage_new',
'minWidthToShow': 1024
},
'topBumper': {
'position': 'top',
'slot': 'dz2_bumper_text_ad',
'minWidthToShow': 1024
},
'bottomBumper': {
'position': 'bottom',
'slot': 'dz2_bumper_text_ad',
'minWidthToShow': 1024
},
'bottom': {
'position': 'bottom',
'slot': 'dz2_article_bottom',
},
'bottomStickyFooter': {
'position': 'sticky',
'slot': 'dz2_sticky_footer_leaderboard',
},
'partner': {
'slot': 'dz2_partner_resource_link',
},
'branded': {
'slot': 'dz2_branded_content',
'refreshable': false
},
'topicBillboard': {
'position': ['top', 'zoneHomepage'],
'slot': 'dz2_topic_billboard',
},
'listPageSidebar': {
'position': 'sidebar',
'slot': 'dz2_list_page_sidebar',
'minWidthToShow': 1024
},
'topListPageLeaderboard2': {
'position': ['top', 'zoneList'],
'slot': 'dz2_list_page_leaderboard_2',
},
'bottomListPageLeaderboard2': {
'position': ['bottom', 'zoneList'],
'slot': 'dz2_list_page_leaderboard_2',
},
'homepageLeaderboard': {
'position': 'top',
'slot': 'dz2_homepage_leaderboard',
},
'homepageLeaderboard2': {
'position': 'bottom',
'slot': 'dz2_homepage_leaderboard_2',
},
'skybox': {
'position': 'above nav',
'slot': 'dz_skybox',
'refreshable': false
},
'inline': {
'position': 'inline',
'slot': 'dz2_inline-article-display',
}
};
var campaign = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search).get("adTargeting_campaign");
window.googletag = window.googletag || { cmd: [] };
if (campaign) {
window.googletag.cmd.push(function() {
window.googletag.setConfig({ targeting: { campaign }});
});
}
let lastHeader = null;
const topContainer = document.querySelector('#top-bumper-container');
const bottomContainer = document.querySelector('#bottom-bumper-container');
function GAM_getPersistentValue(key) {
const stored = JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem(key));
if (!stored) {
return null;
}
const { value, expiration } = stored;
if (expiration && Date.now() >= expiration) {
localStorage.removeItem(key);
return null;
}
return value;
}
function GAM_setPersistentValue(key, value, expiration) {
// 5 minutes from now
if (!expiration) {
expiration = Date.now() + 300000;
}
const storedValue = JSON.stringify({
value: value,
expiration: expiration
});
localStorage.setItem(key, storedValue);
return value;
}
function GAM_synchronousRequest(params) {
const xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open('GET', params.url, false);
xhr.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/json");
if (typeof params.auth_header !== "undefined") {
xhr.setRequestHeader("Authorization", params.auth_header);
}
xhr.send(null);
if (xhr.status === 200) {
return xhr.responseText;
} else {
throw new Error('Request failed: ' + xhr.statusText);
}
}
function GAM_fetch_data(params) {
let stored_data = GAM_getPersistentValue(params.storage_key);
if (stored_data === null) {
try {
const response = GAM_synchronousRequest(params);
const data = JSON.parse(response);
// Store and expire after 30 minutes
return GAM_setPersistentValue(params.storage_key, data, Date.now() + 1800000);
} catch (error) {
console.error('Could not get ' + params.storage_key + ' data: ' + error);
return null;
}
} else {
return stored_data;
}
}
function GAM_setUpSixSenseTargeting() {
let meData = GAM_fetch_data({
url: "https://link.technologyadvice.com/_me",
storage_key: "ta_me_data"
});
let sixSenseData = GAM_fetch_data({
url: "https://epsilon.6sense.com/v3/company/details",
auth_header: "Token d20a1b0e892442270cbc4cb6801c0160d28af04c",
storage_key: "ta_6s_data"
});
function meDataIncludes(i) {
return meData.tags.includes(i);
}
if (typeof meData !== "undefined" && meData !== null) {
window.googletag.pubads().setTargeting("visitor_id", meData.vid);
window.googletag.pubads().setTargeting("user_agent", meData.user_agent);
var tags_mapping = {
"is_datacenter": ["site.is-datacenter"],
"is_suspected_bot": ["site.suspected-bad-bot", "site.bad-bot"],
"is_ta_user": ["site.is-ta-user"],
"is_crawler": ["site.user-agent-blocked"],
"is_ad_blocked": ["site.is-ad-blocked"],
};
for (var key in tags_mapping) {
if (tags_mapping[key].some(meDataIncludes)) {
window.googletag.pubads().setTargeting(key, 'true');
}
}
}
if (typeof sixSenseData !== "undefined" && sixSenseData !== null) {
var segment_ids = [];
if (sixSenseData.segments && sixSenseData.segments.ids && sixSenseData.segments.ids.length) {
sixSenseData.segments.ids.forEach(function (v) {
segment_ids.push(v.toString());
});
}
if (typeof segment_ids !== "undefined" && segment_ids.length > 0) {
window.googletag.pubads().setTargeting("segment_ids_6si", segment_ids);
}
}
}
if (width >= 1024 && (topContainer || bottomContainer)) {
// Dynamically create bumper ad slots for non-mobile devices.
// Prevents ugly dividers being rendered on empty ad slots (mobile)
const topBumper = document.createElement('div');
topBumper.id = 'div-gpt-ad-1435246566686-3';
topBumper.classList.add('article-bumper', 'article-bumper-top', 'dz2_bumper_text_ad');
topBumper.setAttribute('data-gpt-slot', 'topBumper');
topContainer.appendChild(topBumper);
const bottomBumper = document.createElement('div');
bottomBumper.id = 'div-gpt-ad-1435246566686-4';
bottomBumper.classList.add('article-bumper', 'article-bumper-bottom', 'dz2_bumper_text_ad');
bottomBumper.setAttribute('data-gpt-slot', 'bottomBumper');
bottomContainer.appendChild(bottomBumper);
}
if (gptTags.zone) {
gptTags.zone = gptTags.zone.replaceAll(/[\s/]/g, '_')
.replaceAll(/[^a-zA-Z0-9_]/g, '')
.toLowerCase();
}
makeAds();
function handleSkybox() {
const skybox = document.querySelector('div.skybox');
if (skybox) {
document.body.classList.add('skybox-auto-collapse');
// observe classlist changes for offsetting sticky ads
const observer = new MutationObserver((mutations) => {
mutations.forEach((mutation) => {
if (mutation.type === 'attributes' && mutation.attributeName === 'class') {
let offset = 0;
if (!document.body.classList.contains('skybox-closed') && (
document.body.classList.contains('ccad-skybox-manualcollapse')
|| document.body.classList.contains('ccad-skybox-manualexpand')
)) {
offset = skybox.getBoundingClientRect().height;
}
let eligibleAds = [
{ element: document.querySelector('.content-right-images'), offset: 108 },
{ element: document.querySelector('.trending-sidebar'), offset: 88 },
{ element: document.querySelector('.trending'), offset: 88 }
];
for (let ad of eligibleAds) {
if (ad.element) {
ad.element.style.top = (ad.offset + offset) + 'px';
}
}
}
});
});
observer.observe(document.body, { attributes: true });
}
}
function isHeaderEligible(header) {
const range = document.createRange();
range.setStartAfter(lastHeader);
range.setEndBefore(header);
return range.toString().trim().length >= 600;
}
function placeInlineAds() {
const excludedContent = document.querySelectorAll('#ftl-article.branded-content, #ftl-article.sponsored');
if (excludedContent.length > 0) {
return;
}
const headers = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.content-html h2')).splice(1);
let globalIndex = 12;
for (let i = 0; i < headers.length; i++) {
if (!lastHeader || isHeaderEligible(headers[i])) {
const element = document.createElement('div');
element.id = 'div-gpt-ad-1435246566686-' + globalIndex;
element.classList.add('inline-display', 'dz2_inline-article-display');
element.setAttribute('data-gpt-slot', 'inline');
headers[i].before(element);
lastHeader = element;
globalIndex++;
}
}
}
function makeAds() {
handleSkybox();
placeInlineAds();
const script = document.createElement('script');
script.src = 'https://i6ByW9Zmz4ncxhHkb.ay.delivery/manager/i6ByW9Zmz4ncxhHkb';
script.type = 'text/javascript';
script.referrerPolicy = 'no-referrer-when-downgrade';
document.head.appendChild(script);
window.googletag.cmd.push(function() {
const containers = document.querySelectorAll('div[data-gpt-slot]');
for (let container of containers) {
const div = container.getAttribute('data-gpt-slot');
const meta = metadata[div];
if (meta.minWidthToShow && width < meta.minWidthToShow) {
continue;
}
window.googletag.pubads().setTargeting('hostname', window.location.hostname);
Object.keys(gptTags).forEach(function(key) {
window.googletag.pubads().setTargeting(key, gptTags[key]);
});
window.googletag.pubads().addEventListener('slotRenderEnded', (event) => {
window.requestAnimationFrame(() => {
var slotId = event.slot.getSlotElementId();
if (!slotId.includes('__ayManagerEnv__')) {
return;
}
var className = slotId.split('__ayManagerEnv__')[0];
var slotName = className.replace('dz2_', '').replace('dz_', '').replace(/_\d+$/, '');
var unitName = meta.slot.replace('dz2_', '').replace('dz_', '').replace(/_\d+$/, '');
if (slotName !== unitName) {
return;
}
var elem = document.getElementById(slotId);
if (!elem) {
console.warn('Ad element missing', slotId);
return;
}
// Ad unit did not fill, collapse slot
if (event.isEmpty && elem.parentElement) {
elem.parentElement.style.display = 'none';
}
});
});
}
GAM_setUpSixSenseTargeting();
});
}
</script>
<script async>// InMobi Choice. Consent Manager Tag v3.0 (for TCF 2.2)
!function(){var e=window.location.hostname,t=document.createElement("script"),n=document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0],a="https://cmp.inmobi.com".concat("/choice/","vPn77x7pBG57Y","/","dzone.com","/choice.js?tag_version=V3"),p=0;t.async=!0,t.type="text/javascript",t.src=a,n.parentNode.insertBefore(t,n),function(){for(var e,t="__tcfapiLocator",n=[],a=window;a;){try{if(a.frames[t]){e=a;break}}catch(e){}if(a===window.top)break;a=a.parent}e||(!function e(){var n=a.document,p=!!a.frames[t];if(!p)if(n.body){var s=n.createElement("iframe");s.style.cssText="display:none",s.name=t,n.body.appendChild(s)}else setTimeout(e,5);return!p}(),a.__tcfapi=function(){var e,t=arguments;if(!t.length)return n;if("setGdprApplies"===t[0])t.length>3&&2===t[2]&&"boolean"==typeof t[3]&&(e=t[3],"function"==typeof t[2]&&t[2]("set",!0));else if("ping"===t[0]){var a={gdprApplies:e,cmpLoaded:!1,cmpStatus:"stub"};"function"==typeof t[2]&&t[2](a)}else"init"===t[0]&&"object"==typeof t[3]&&(t[3]=Object.assign(t[3],{tag_version:"V3"})),n.push(t)},a.addEventListener("message",(function(e){var t="string"==typeof e.data,n={};try{n=t?JSON.parse(e.data):e.data}catch(e){}var a=n.__tcfapiCall;a&&window.__tcfapi(a.command,a.version,(function(n,p){var s={__tcfapiReturn:{returnValue:n,success:p,callId:a.callId}};t&&(s=JSON.stringify(s)),e&&e.source&&e.source.postMessage&&e.source.postMessage(s,"*")}),a.parameter)}),!1))}(),function(){const e=["2:tcfeuv2","6:uspv1","7:usnatv1","8:usca","9:usvav1","10:uscov1","11:usutv1","12:usctv1"];window.__gpp_addFrame=function(e){if(!window.frames[e])if(document.body){var t=document.createElement("iframe");t.style.cssText="display:none",t.name=e,document.body.appendChild(t)}else window.setTimeout(window.__gpp_addFrame,10,e)},window.__gpp_stub=function(){var t=arguments;if(__gpp.queue=__gpp.queue||[],__gpp.events=__gpp.events||[],!t.length||1==t.length&&"queue"==t[0])return __gpp.queue;if(1==t.length&&"events"==t[0])return __gpp.events;var n=t[0],a=t.length>1?t[1]:null,p=t.length>2?t[2]:null;if("ping"===n)a({gppVersion:"1.1",cmpStatus:"stub",cmpDisplayStatus:"hidden",signalStatus:"not ready",supportedAPIs:e,cmpId:10,sectionList:[],applicableSections:[-1],gppString:"",parsedSections:{}},!0);else if("addEventListener"===n){"lastId"in __gpp||(__gpp.lastId=0),__gpp.lastId++;var s=__gpp.lastId;__gpp.events.push({id:s,callback:a,parameter:p}),a({eventName:"listenerRegistered",listenerId:s,data:!0,pingData:{gppVersion:"1.1",cmpStatus:"stub",cmpDisplayStatus:"hidden",signalStatus:"not ready",supportedAPIs:e,cmpId:10,sectionList:[],applicableSections:[-1],gppString:"",parsedSections:{}}},!0)}else if("removeEventListener"===n){for(var i=!1,o=0;o<__gpp.events.length;o++)if(__gpp.events[o].id==p){__gpp.events.splice(o,1),i=!0;break}a({eventName:"listenerRemoved",listenerId:p,data:i,pingData:{gppVersion:"1.1",cmpStatus:"stub",cmpDisplayStatus:"hidden",signalStatus:"not ready",supportedAPIs:e,cmpId:10,sectionList:[],applicableSections:[-1],gppString:"",parsedSections:{}}},!0)}else"hasSection"===n?a(!1,!0):"getSection"===n||"getField"===n?a(null,!0):__gpp.queue.push([].slice.apply(t))},window.__gpp_msghandler=function(e){var t="string"==typeof e.data;try{var n=t?JSON.parse(e.data):e.data}catch(e){n=null}if("object"==typeof n&&null!==n&&"__gppCall"in n){var a=n.__gppCall;window.__gpp(a.command,(function(n,p){var s={__gppReturn:{returnValue:n,success:p,callId:a.callId}};e.source.postMessage(t?JSON.stringify(s):s,"*")}),"parameter"in a?a.parameter:null,"version"in a?a.version:"1.1")}},"__gpp"in window&&"function"==typeof window.__gpp||(window.__gpp=window.__gpp_stub,window.addEventListener("message",window.__gpp_msghandler,!1),window.__gpp_addFrame("__gppLocator"))}();var s=function(){var e=arguments;typeof window.__uspapi!==s&&setTimeout((function(){void 0!==window.__uspapi&&window.__uspapi.apply(window.__uspapi,e)}),500)};if(void 0===window.__uspapi){window.__uspapi=s;var i=setInterval((function(){p++,window.__uspapi===s&&p<3?console.warn("USP is not accessible"):clearInterval(i)}),6e3)}}();
</script>
<script async>
(function(w, d, s, l, i) {
w[l] = w[l] || [];
w[l].push({'gtm.start': new Date().getTime(), event: 'gtm.js'});
var f = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0], j = d.createElement(s), dl = l != 'dataLayer' ? '&l=' + l : '';
j.async = true;
j.src = 'https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id=' + i + dl;
f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window, document, 'script', 'dataLayer', 'GTM-K25QL22');
</script>
<script>
window.ga=window.ga||function(){(ga.q=ga.q||[]).push(arguments)};ga.l=+new Date;
ga('create', 'UA-410289-1', 'auto');
ga('require', 'linkid', 'linkid.js');
ga('require', 'GTM-TSD9TZP');
ga('set', 'siteSpeedSampleRate', 25);
</script>
<script async src="https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js"></script>
<script async>var analytics = {
'dimension1': 'Performance',
'dimension2': 'article/opinion',
'dimension3': '2026-02-27',
'dimension4': '0',
'dimension5': '',
'dimension7': 'Chaos engineering, Database, IT, Site reliability engineering',
'dimension8': 'Eyanus',
'dimension9': 'undefined',
'dimension10': 'Jon'
};
if (window.ga) {
Object.keys(analytics).forEach(function(key) {
window.ga('set', key, analytics[key]);
});
window.ga('send', 'pageview');
}</script>
<script src="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/lib/static/jquery/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script async src="https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/lib/static/bootstrap/bootstrap.min.js"></script>
<script>
function loadScript(src) {
return new Promise(function (resolve, reject) {
const s = document.createElement('script');
s.src = src;
s.onload = resolve;
s.onerror = reject;
document.head.appendChild(s);
});
}
function loadStyle(href) {
const link = document.createElement('link');
link.rel = 'stylesheet';
link.href = href;
document.head.appendChild(link);
}
function loadScriptsSync(deferred) {
var p = Promise.resolve();
for (var i = 0; i < deferred.length; i++) {
let script = deferred[i];
p = p.then(function() {
return loadScript(script);
});
}
return p;
}
function loadStyles() {
const deferred = [
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/lib/codemirror/lib/codemirror.css',
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/ftl/comments/styles.css',
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/lib/froala3/css/froala_editor.pkgd.min.css',
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/lib/froala3/css/themes/gray.min.css',
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/ftl/article/mini-profile.css'
];
for (var i = 0; i < deferred.length; i++) {
loadStyle(deferred[i]);
}
}
window.addEventListener('load', function(_event) {
loadStyles();
loadScriptsSync([
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/lib/lazysizes.min.js',
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/ftl/article/codeblocks.js',
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/ftl/article/activity-bar.js',
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/lib/froala3/js/froala_editor.pkgd.min.js',
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/ftl/froala/content.js',
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/ftl/comments/content.js',
'https://dz2cdn1.dzone.com/themes/dz20/ftl/article/content.js'
]);
});
</script>
</body>
</html>