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by swiftcoder 33 days ago
> A deterministic failure doesn’t get better when you retry it

Among all the other nonsense here, this one is solid advice. Most software with retries just blindly retries N times - in reality, you need a retry/backoff policy based on the specific type of error encountered (I've been rooting these out of our own software stack lately)

2 comments

This operation should not have been retried even once. The overall operation failed due to an unsatisfied precondition that a second attempt could not have rectified (the non-existent target resource). The status of the job should have transitioned to permanent failure, awaiting manual intervention.
I think we are talking at cross-purposes - a retry policy of retries=0 is still a retry policy
Yup exponential backoff. But this is all just bandaid: like saying there should at least be some tests.

It doesn't change the underlying problem though: slop is slop and that turd the CFO produced would still be a turd.

"Here's a piece of shit that doesn't work, but at least it's cheap" is no way to operate.