Retry Strategies for Sagas

When a saga executes, its individual steps often involve calling other microservices. These calls can sometimes fail due to temporary issues like network glitches, service restarts, or brief overloads.

Retry strategies are essential mechanisms that allow saga steps to automatically re-attempt failed operations, helping the overall saga complete successfully despite transient errors.

A simple retry mechanism might just wait a fixed, short period (e.g., 1 second) and then re-attempt the operation. While better than nothing, this approach has limitations:

• It can quickly overwhelm a service that is already struggling.
• If many services retry at the same fixed interval, it can create a 'retry storm'.
• It doesn't adapt to the severity or duration of the failure.