Building Microservices with Go

Back off

Typically, once a connection has failed, you do not want to retry immediately to avoid flooding the network or the server with requests. To allow this, it's necessary to implement a back-off approach to your retry strategy. A back-off algorithm waits for a set period before retrying after the first failure, this then increments with subsequent failures up to a maximum duration.

Using this strategy inside a client-called API might not be desirable as it contravenes the requirement to fail fast. However, if we have a worker process that is only processing a queue of messages, then this could be exactly the right strategy to add a little protection to your system.

We will look at the go-resiliency package and the retrier package.