Retries and Idempotency

🧪 Active Investigation Why do retries and lack of idempotency cause major failures in distributed systems?

CURRENT POSITION Most large-scale outages are caused not by failures themselves, but by uncontrolled retries and non-idempotent operations that amplify partial failures.

KEY ASSUMPTIONS Distributed systems are always in a state of partial failure Retries without strict idempotency amplify load and cause cascading failures Many retry mechanisms are enabled by default without system-level coordination

SUPPORTING EVIDENCE Real-world outages often stem from retry storms where upstream services overwhelm degraded downstream dependencies. AWS Architecture Blog and postmortems show that retry storms and thundering herd effects are common root causes of cascading failures in distributed systems. Google SRE literature documents that retries without backoff and idempotency can amplify partial outages into full system failures.

OPEN QUESTIONS How well modern AI-generated systems handle coordinated retries and idempotency at scale

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