Stop Building Retry Logic From Scratch
📰 Medium · Programming
Learn why naive retry logic can be harmful and how to improve it with backoff, jitter, and error handling to prevent thundering herd and other issues
Action Steps
- Identify areas in your code where naive retry logic is used
- Implement exponential backoff to space out retries
- Add jitter to retry timings to prevent thundering herd
- Handle errors properly to avoid retrying failed operations
- Use existing libraries or frameworks to implement retry logic
Who Needs to Know This
Developers and DevOps engineers can benefit from this article to improve the reliability and scalability of their systems by implementing better retry logic
Key Insight
💡 Naive retry logic can lead to thundering herd and other issues, but implementing backoff, jitter, and proper error handling can improve system reliability
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Improve your system's reliability with better retry logic! Avoid thundering herd and other issues with exponential backoff, jitter, and proper error handling
Key Takeaways
Learn why naive retry logic can be harmful and how to improve it with backoff, jitter, and error handling to prevent thundering herd and other issues
Full Article
Title: Stop Building Retry Logic From Scratch
URL Source: https://medium.com/@illia.sheptukha/stop-building-retry-logic-from-scratch-e47bcb374174?source=rss------programming-5
Published Time: 2026-04-20T16:07:21Z
Markdown Content:
# Stop Building Retry Logic From Scratch | by Illia Sheptukha | Apr, 2026 | Medium
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I’ve reviewed a lot of Go code over the years. If there’s one pattern I see reimplemented badly more than any other, it’s retries.
It usually starts like this:
for i := 0; i < 3; i++ {
err := doSomething()
if err == nil {
break
}
time.Sleep(time.Second)
}
Three retries, one second apart, no backoff, no jitter, retries every error including the ones that will never succeed. I’ve written this exact code myself. More than once. It works right up until it doesn’t.
## Why Naive Retries Break Things
That simple loop has a few problems that don’t show up in development but absolutely show up in production.
**Problem 1: Thundering herd.** Your service has 50 pods. The downstream dependency goes down for 10 seconds. All 50 pods fail at roughly the same time. All 50 pods retry after exactly 1 second. The dependency gets slammed with 50x normal traffic the moment it comes back. It goes down again.
**Problem
URL Source: https://medium.com/@illia.sheptukha/stop-building-retry-logic-from-scratch-e47bcb374174?source=rss------programming-5
Published Time: 2026-04-20T16:07:21Z
Markdown Content:
# Stop Building Retry Logic From Scratch | by Illia Sheptukha | Apr, 2026 | Medium
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I’ve reviewed a lot of Go code over the years. If there’s one pattern I see reimplemented badly more than any other, it’s retries.
It usually starts like this:
for i := 0; i < 3; i++ {
err := doSomething()
if err == nil {
break
}
time.Sleep(time.Second)
}
Three retries, one second apart, no backoff, no jitter, retries every error including the ones that will never succeed. I’ve written this exact code myself. More than once. It works right up until it doesn’t.
## Why Naive Retries Break Things
That simple loop has a few problems that don’t show up in development but absolutely show up in production.
**Problem 1: Thundering herd.** Your service has 50 pods. The downstream dependency goes down for 10 seconds. All 50 pods fail at roughly the same time. All 50 pods retry after exactly 1 second. The dependency gets slammed with 50x normal traffic the moment it comes back. It goes down again.
**Problem
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