Glossary · Reliability & operations
Retry Budget
A bound on retry traffic, usually expressed relative to original requests or over a time window, that prevents retries from consuming unbounded capacity.
Why it matters
When a dependency slows or fails, unrestricted retries multiply load exactly when the system has the least spare capacity.
In practice
Count retries separately from first attempts, cap them by service and tenant, honor deadlines, use jittered backoff, and stop retrying non-transient or non-idempotent failures.
Common confusion
A retry budget limits extra attempts. An error budget measures user-visible unreliability allowed by an SLO.
Related terms
Sources
Browse the learning paths to see this term in context — every lesson is free to read.