Topic: reliability
-
Timeouts, retries and backoff with jitter
Every remote call needs a timeout; retries must be bounded, applied only to idempotent or key-protected operations, and spaced with exponential backoff plus jitter to avoid synchronised retry storms.
-
Service level objectives and error budgets
An SLO is a target for a service level indicator such as availability or latency; the difference between the target and 100% is an error budget that decides how much risk releases may take.
-
Designing idempotent operations and safe retries
An operation is idempotent if repeating it has the same effect as doing it once; HTTP defines which methods are idempotent, and idempotency keys extend the property to POST so clients can retry without duplicates.
-
Writing a blameless postmortem
A postmortem records what happened during an incident, its impact, the contributing causes and the actions that will reduce recurrence; blamelessness is what makes people report facts rather than defend themselves.
-
Liveness and readiness checks
A liveness check answers whether a process should be restarted; a readiness check answers whether it should receive traffic. Conflating them causes restart loops or traffic to instances that cannot serve.
Machine-readable: JSON