Level 3: Distributed systems · L3.2 Timeouts, retries, idempotency, rate limiting, circuit breakers
Retries with backoff and jitter
Design retries that don't cause retry storms.
12 min · Pro
What you take away
- Retry only retriable errors — timeouts, connection failures and 5xx — and only operations that are safe to repeat.
And 3 more inside the class, in Pro.
How the class is laid out
- The problem
- The simple version
- Backoff, then jitter
- The two failure modes worth naming
- Check your understanding