The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again” - this quote attributed to Einstein warns us of the danger of magical thinking, hoping that trying something just one more time will achieve success when before we failed. But is this really insanity?
In this talk, I’ll argue that retrying things actually does make a lot of sense, and is in fact key to improving the resilience of a distributed system. Along the way, I’ll explain the importance of timeouts, retry limits and knowing when giving up does make sense. I’ll also show how retries can be made safe (and help avoid draining your bank account), and perhaps we’ll get to examine that Einstein quote in a bit more detail.
Speaker
Sam Newman
Microservice, Cloud, CI/CD Expert, Author of "Building Microservices" and "Monolith to Microservices", 20+ Years Experience as a Developer
Sam is a technologist focusing in the areas of cloud, microservices, and continuous delivery - three topics which seem to overlap frequently. Providing consulting, training and advisory services to startups and large multi-national enterprises alike, he has over 20 years in IT as a developer, sys admin and architect. Sam is also author of the best selling Building Microservices and Monolith To Microservices, both from O’Reilly, and is an experienced conference speaker.
