Articles
Timeouts, retries, and backoff with jitter
Marc Brooker's entry in the AWS Builders' Library is the clearest explanation I've read of why naive retry logic makes outages worse, not better: synchronized retries from thousands of clients can turn a brief blip into a self-inflicted thundering herd. The fix, jittered exponential backoff paired with timeout budgets tied to real latency percentiles, is simple to state and easy to get wrong in practice. I reference this every time I review a service's failure-handling code.