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by SpicyLemonZest 1514 days ago
It’s a problem for those of us who build consumer APIs, because people without a deep distributed systems background quite reasonably expect that “exactly once” means their downstream application will receive each event exactly once. I’ve had multiple incredibly frustrating conversations where I had to find a diplomatic way to explain that yes, your connector needs to handle idempotency, and no, it’s not because there’s some “exactly once” technology our system is missing.
1 comments

Yeah, 100%. I've had a tier-one telco complain to me - very seriously - that my API was too complex because I wanted them to include a user-generated UUID in an API call, so we could ensure we only processed it once. It was very frustrating to be told that we're making things too complex when the whole point was to make it more reliable. A lot of people - including telco software engineers, it turns out - just treat computers as magical.