Exponential Backoff
A retry strategy that doubles the wait time between attempts (1s, 2s, 4s, 8s...) with random jitter. Prevents thundering herd problems when many clients retry simultaneously.
What is Exponential Backoff?
A retry strategy that doubles the wait time between attempts (1s, 2s, 4s, 8s...) with random jitter. Prevents thundering herd problems when many clients retry simultaneously.
Exponential Backoff is a intermediate-level concept that sits in the Microservices Architecture area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Exponential Backoff" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
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See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
Retry
Automatically re-attempting a failed operation, usually with exponential backoff. Essential for handling transient failures in distributed systems.
Circuit Breaker
A pattern that stops calling a failing service after repeated failures, preventing cascade failures. Like an electrical circuit breaker that cuts power to prevent fires.
Idempotency
An operation that produces the same result whether you run it once or multiple times. Critical for safe retries in distributed systems.