Retry in fault tolerance lets you retry a request to another service in case the first request fails (see Chapter 3, MicroProfile Config and Fault Tolerance, for more information). Now, consider that you have the following code:
@Retry (maxRetries = 3)void aMethod() { callBackend();}
Although this tells Istio to retry 5 times, you may end up with 15 retries (Istio will retry 5 times for each of the 3 retries in your code before it returns an error) before aMethod finally ends with an error. You may consider turning off the retries in code, as changes to the number of retries in Istio can be made on the fly without the need to restart a pod.