Retry with Exponential Backoff

1. The Incident

Your checkout service calls a payment provider over the network. The provider is healthy. Your code is correct.

And yet 1 out of every 200 calls fails. A dropped packet here, a connection reset there, one unlucky server behind their load balancer. Nothing is "down," and that is normal network behavior.

Now scale it to 100,000 orders a day, where 1 in 200 means 500 customers a day. Each one typed in a card number, clicked Pay, and got an error screen. The very same request, sent again 100 milliseconds later, would have succeeded.

Support tickets pile up