Retry Pattern

Kind: pattern

Layer: Correctness Core

Aliases: Retry

Record: architecture:retry-pattern

Severity: contextual

Scope: network, IO, message handling

Canonical: Ontology

A design pattern that repeats an idempotent call after a transient failure, a bounded number of times with backoff.

Listed in Architecture principles, after Fallback Pattern and before Timeout Pattern.

Requires

• Idempotency
• Timeout
• Backoff

Reinforces

• Fault Tolerance

Enables

• Transient Failure Recovery

Conflicts with

• Non-Idempotent Operation

In tension with

• Load Amplification

Tensions

• Retry Pattern / Load Amplification

Violated by

• Unbounded Retry
• Retry Storm

Refactored by

• Backoff
• Idempotency Key

Severity

• contextual

Category

• Error Handling / Resilience

Required by

• Eventual Consistency

Refactors

• Resilience

Linked from

• Keywords
• A report, not a checkbox
• Computation and resource
• Scale follows determinism
• Architectural rules and principles
• Event / Messaging / Asynchronous Architecture
• Error Handling / Resilience
• Transactions / State / Concurrency
• Error Handling / Resilience
• Severity levels
• The resolutions