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Robust API communication with exponential backoff

2020-11-01

Every API fails at random points of time and that’s unavoidable. Sadly, it’s not taken care correctly during integrating third party API’s. I see it very often. „Hey there! But I’m using try-catch and handle errors, sometimes even I log them to the file…” one might say. Well, so what? What happens when it fails and you miss data which needed to be fetched during the daily ETL process? Or your business partner misses information if you send data to their API and for some reason, it fails. What then? As long as you use cron and have output emailed to some mailbox, which is being monitored – you’ll notice. Maybe you use Sentry or any other application monitoring/error tracking software and you’ll spot some anomaly. But imagine having dozens of such jobs running on a daily basis – it’s easy to lose track.

I think you get my point now. API errors occur quite often. Most of them are due to temporary service unavailability, caused mainly by having too much traffic at the moment. The simple solution is to retry. In this post, I’ll show how to easily implement efficient retry mechanism.

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