Wednesday
Room 2
15:00 - 16:00
(UTC+01)
Talk (60 min)
Definition Of Insanity - Timeouts, retries, and idempotency
“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…
Sam Newman
Sam Newman is interested in technology at the intersection of things, from development, to ops, to security, usability and organisations. After over a decade at ThoughtWorks he is now an independent consultant. Sam is the author of "Building Microservices" from O'Reilly. He has worked with a variety of companies in multiple domains around the world, often with one foot in the developer world, and another in the IT operations space. If you asked him what he does, he’d say ‘I work with people to build better software systems’. He has written articles, presented at conferences, and sporadically commits to open source projects. While Java used to be his bread and butter, he also spends time with Ruby, Python, Javascript, and Clojure, Infrastructure Automation and Cloud systems.