Timeouts, retries, and backoff with jitter
Whenever one service or system calls another, failures can happen. These failures can come from a variety of factors. They include servers, networks, load balancers, software, operating systems, or even mistakes from system operators. We design our systems to reduce the probability of failure, but impossible to build systems that never fail. So in Amazon, we design our systems to tolerate and reduce the probability of failure, and avoid magnifying a small percentage of failures into a complete outage. To build resilient systems, we employ three essential tools (timeouts, retries, and backoff).