Amazon Builders’ Library in focus #1: Timeouts, retries, and backoff with jitter

The Amazon Builders' Library is a collection of articles written by principal engineers at Amazon that explain how the company builds scalable and resilient systems. The library's first article, "Timeouts, retries and backoff with jitter," provides insights into the use of timeouts, retries, and exponential backoff to handle errors in system calls, as well as the importance of injecting randomness (jitter) to avoid clients retrying at the same time. Amazon chooses an acceptable rate of false timeout and uses this information to set a dynamic timeout value on remote and cross-process calls. The library also discusses the use of circuit breakers, idempotency, and jitter in APIs with side effects, as well as the importance of knowing which errors to retry.

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