Upgrade to Pro
— share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …
Speaker Deck
Features
Speaker Deck
PRO
Sign in
Sign up for free
Search
Search
Design for Retry (Oneshot Budapest)
Search
Aria Stewart
November 21, 2014
Programming
0
65
Design for Retry (Oneshot Budapest)
Aria Stewart
November 21, 2014
Tweet
Share
More Decks by Aria Stewart
See All by Aria Stewart
Nuts and Bolts of Internationalization
aredridel
0
180
Design for Retry (Nodevember)
aredridel
0
53
Other Decks in Programming
See All in Programming
国漢文混用体からHolloまで
minhee
1
200
Optimizing JRuby 10
headius
0
390
Module Boundaries and Architecture with Forensic Analysis @NxSummit Amsterdam 2025
manfredsteyer
PRO
0
100
[NG India] Event-Based State Management with NgRx SignalStore
markostanimirovic
1
160
The Evolution of the CRuby Build System
kateinoigakukun
0
720
Vibe Coding の話をしよう
schroneko
10
2.5k
ComposeでWebアプリを作る技術
tbsten
0
110
Contribute to Comunities | React Tokyo Meetup #4 LT
sasagar
0
500
gen_statem - OTP's Unsung Hero
whatyouhide
1
210
PHP で学ぶ OAuth 入門
azuki
1
210
AIコーディングエージェントを 「使いこなす」ための実践知と現在地 in ログラス / How to Use AI Coding Agent in Loglass
rkaga
3
510
Deoptimization: How YJIT Speeds Up Ruby by Slowing Down / RubyKaigi 2025
k0kubun
0
860
Featured
See All Featured
Rails Girls Zürich Keynote
gr2m
94
13k
Optimising Largest Contentful Paint
csswizardry
36
3.2k
Let's Do A Bunch of Simple Stuff to Make Websites Faster
chriscoyier
507
140k
Build your cross-platform service in a week with App Engine
jlugia
229
18k
How To Stay Up To Date on Web Technology
chriscoyier
790
250k
jQuery: Nuts, Bolts and Bling
dougneiner
63
7.7k
Performance Is Good for Brains [We Love Speed 2024]
tammyeverts
9
760
Creating an realtime collaboration tool: Agile Flush - .NET Oxford
marcduiker
30
2k
Learning to Love Humans: Emotional Interface Design
aarron
273
40k
YesSQL, Process and Tooling at Scale
rocio
172
14k
XXLCSS - How to scale CSS and keep your sanity
sugarenia
248
1.3M
Exploring the Power of Turbo Streams & Action Cable | RailsConf2023
kevinliebholz
32
5.4k
Transcript
Design for Retry: Microservices, REST, and why Idempotency is the
only way to scale I'm Aria Stewart, that's @aredridel just about everywhere. I'm here thanks to PayPal. I work on the open source Kraken.js framework.
I'm going to talk about errors. It's going to be
okay.
if (err) { alert(err.message); } else { doMyThing(); }
We all know HTTP
2xx OK 3xx Go elsewhere 4xx Tell user what they
did wrong 5xx Bail out and log an error I'd call this Error avoidance
You can't avoid errors
Here's the secret Handle errors instead
4xx Tell the user what they did wrong 5xx Save
that request and do something with it later.
Retry it 5xx are errors the requestor can handle
But you can't just do things twice? We must make
operations idempotent
Idempotency Repeated actions have no effect, give the same result
This means being smart about IDs. Don't recycle! Check if things are already done. They are? Just give the same answer again.
Causes! —database down —bug in a service —Deploy in progress
—power failure —kicked a cable —Network congestion —Capacity exceeded —Microbursts
—Tree fell on the data center —earthquake —tornado —birds, snakes
and aeroplanes —Black Friday —Slashdot effect —Interns —QA tests —DoS attack
You need a queue
Lots of ways to do it Database on each node.
Maybe LevelDB? Log file Queue server
gearman Queues built in There are many alternatives, but gearmand
is very simple. The memcache of job queues.
Three statuses: —OK (Like 200) —FAIL (Like 400) —ERROR (Like
500)
design so ERROR can be retried.
gearmand automatically tries a job ERROR again. And again. And
again.
If it isn't sure it worked? Tries it again.
You cannot know if an error is a failure.
Error handling gets simpler —Exception? ERROR. —Database down? ERROR. —Downstream
service timeout? ERROR. Maybe you retry right away.
How many of you have used a job queue?
You have used a job queue
Let me tell you about one TRILLIONS of messages MILLIONS
of nodes 100% availability (at least partial) for years. 32 years. Resilient to MILLIONS of bad actors. It is attached to the most malicious network.
EMAIL. 250 OK 4xx RETRY 5xx Fail
Responsibility for messages 250 - accept responsibility 4xx - reject
responsibility 5xx - return responsibility
reject responsibility. If there's an error? Fail fast. The requester
can retry.
Fail fast. Queue work you can't reject. Reject everything you
can if there is an error.
You need a smart client. Keeps outstanding requests. Resubmit. Try
a different server! Try a second queue service. Maybe have a fallback plan.
Smart Clients on the device Toto, we're not in AWS
anymore.
Ever lose an email because you've been logged out?
Latency + Mutable state = Distributed system CAP Theorem Applies!
C = Consistency If there's state that one part knows
of that another doesn't? That's inconsistency.
Job queues are controlled inconsistency.
Ever try to write email on the web while not
on the Internet? It's cloud easy!
This is really good for offline-first design! Being offline is
the ultimate retriable error.
Some ideas
Use your queue as a place to measure for system
sizing
Queue things in localStorage
Use third-party storage
Integrate third-party services with this approach.
Use different strategies for available resources vs contended
Thank you! I hope you have lots of ideas queued
up. Save your ideas and unspool them onto Twitter when you get home. Let me know if this changed how you think about designing applications!