Retry policies

Configure exponential backoff, max attempts, and dead-letter handling.

Retries turn transient failures into success stories—when configured carefully. Backoff spreads load; max attempts bound damage; dead-letter queues preserve poison messages for inspection instead of infinite loops.

Backoff

Exponential backoff reduces thundering herds. Add jitter to desynchronize clients so retries do not align on the same second.

Caps

Put an upper bound on delay so a permanently broken endpoint does not stall workers for hours between attempts—pair backoff with a max attempts ceiling.

Max attempts

Stop after N tries and surface to operators with context. Include the last error code, truncated body, and correlation ID so the first responder does not reproduce the whole incident from scratch.

Idempotency

Retries assume idempotent handlers. If a step is not idempotent, disable blind retries or scope them to safe sub-operations.

Dead letters

Send poison messages to a dead-letter queue for manual inspection. Monitor DLQ depth: a flat line at zero might mean alerts are misconfigured; a rising line means systemic failure.

Replay

Document a safe replay procedure after fixing root cause—sometimes replay requires a new idempotency key or compensating cleanup first.