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Error Handling & Retries (AWS & GCP)

This lesson is a direct copy/summary of the platform's resilient patterns. For full code examples, see: ../level-3-operate/lesson-04-error-handling

Topics covered: retry strategies, exponential backoff, jitter, DLQs, Cloud Tasks, Pub/Sub dead-letter topics, circuit breakers, and monitoring of failure rates.

Simple Explanation​

What it is​

This lesson summarizes how to build safe retries and recovery paths in serverless systems across AWS and GCP.

Why we need it​

Failures are normal. The goal is to recover automatically and avoid double-processing.

Benefits​

  • Fewer outages from transient errors.
  • Cleaner recovery with DLQs and replay.
  • More confidence in async workflows.

Tradeoffs​

  • Extra complexity in design and testing.
  • More storage for deduplication and error records.

Real-world examples (architecture only)​

  • Queue worker retries -> DLQ -> Manual replay.
  • API retry policy -> Backoff -> Success.

Retry to DLQ flow API retry with backoff