Retry & Fallback Patterns

Handle transient failures gracefully.

When to Use This Skill

• Network requests that occasionally fail
• External services with temporary outages
• Need graceful degradation when dependencies fail
• Want to avoid cascading failures

Core Concepts

1. Exponential backoff - Increasing delays between retries
2. Jitter - Random variation prevents thundering herd
3. Fallback - Alternative data source when primary fails
4. Graceful degradation - Reduced functionality beats total failure

TypeScript Implementation