Python resilience patterns including automatic retries, exponential backoff, timeouts, and fault-tolerant decorators. Use when adding retry logic, implementing timeouts, building fault-tolerant services, or handling transient failures.
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Python resilience patterns including automatic retries, exponential backoff, timeouts, and fault-tolerant decorators. Use when adding retry logic, implementing timeouts, building fault-tolerant services, or handling transient failures.
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</> SKILL.md
python-resilience.SKILL.md
---name: python-resilience
description: Python resilience patterns including automatic retries, exponential backoff, timeouts, and fault-tolerant decorators. Use when adding retry logic, implementing timeouts, building fault-tolerant services, or handling transient failures.
---# Python Resilience Patterns
Build fault-tolerant Python applications that gracefully handle transient failures, network issues, and service outages. Resilience patterns keep systems running when dependencies are unreliable.
## When to Use This Skill
- Adding retry logic to external service calls
- Implementing timeouts for network operations
- Building fault-tolerant microservices
- Handling rate limiting and backpressure
- Creating infrastructure decorators
- Designing circuit breakers
## Core Concepts
### 1. Transient vs Permanent Failures
Retry transient errors (network timeouts, temporary service issues). Don't retry permanent errors (invalid credentials, bad requests).
### 2. Exponential Backoff
Increase wait time between retries to avoid overwhelming recovering services.
### 3. Jitter
Add randomness to backoff to prevent thundering herd when many clients retry simultaneously.
### 4. Bounded Retries
Use the `tenacity` library for production-grade retry logic. For simpler cases, consider built-in retry functionality or a lightweight custom implementation.
Detailed sections (starting with `## Advanced Patterns`) live in `references/details.md`. Read that file when the navigation summary above is insufficient.
## Best Practices Summary
1. **Retry only transient errors** - Don't retry bugs or authentication failures
2. **Use exponential backoff** - Give services time to recover
3. **Add jitter** - Prevent thundering herd from synchronized retries
4. **Cap total duration** - `stop_after_attempt(5) | stop_after_delay(60)`
5. **Log every retry** - Silent retries hide systemic problems
6. **Use decorators** - Keep retry logic separate from business logic
7. **Inject dependencies** - Make infrastructure testable
8. **Set timeouts everywhere** - Every network call needs a timeout
9. **Fail gracefully** - Return cached/default values for non-critical paths
