Reviewed by Aditya Kumar · Last reviewed 2026-03-24
**Why Robust Handling**: APIs fail—transient (5xx, timeout) vs. permanent (4xx). Retrying 400 wastes time; not retrying 503 causes false failures. **Strategy**: Exponential backoff with jitter to avoid thundering herd; cap retries (3-5); circuit breaker after consecutive...
Why Robust Handling: APIs fail—transient (5xx, timeout) vs. permanent (4xx). Retrying 400 wastes time; not retrying 503 causes false failures.
Strategy: Exponential backoff with jitter to avoid thundering herd; cap retries (3-5); circuit breaker after consecutive failures. Idempotency keys for POST/PUT.
Cost: Retries add latency and load; distinguish retriable vs. non-retriable. Log request IDs for correlation. At scale: circuit breakers protect downstream.
Pro-Move: 'We use tenacity in Python with retry only on 503/timeout; 400/404 fail fast. Idempotency keys for all mutating APIs.'
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