clarify retry strategy about dynamo

[mhart]

The tricky thing about this is that there is some DynamoDB-specific logic that needs to be dealt with - and leaving this up to the user unnecessarily burdens them IMO.

Some examples of the sorts of things that other client libraries deal with:

https://github.com/amazonwebservices/aws-sdk-for-php/blob/master/sdk.class.php#L936-977

https://github.com/boto/boto/blob/develop/boto/dynamodb/layer1.py#L150-179

https://github.com/teleportd/node-dynamodb/blob/master/lib/ddb.js#L918-950

So it might be OK to exclude this from the lib - but I think it would be really nice to include an example of the things you need to keep in mind when retrying, or even better, a util to do the retrying so that users can opt in.

[jed]

good points, @mhart, and thanks for the other references. it seems there's enough consensus here.

how about this: we handle all retry logic according to best practices (backoff, etc) for the next function, but allow the user to decide whether to call it or not. thoughts?

[mhart]

I guess I haven't used it enough in production yet to know what the most likely use case would be.

My main question is: when would you not want to retry? Are there any examples you know of using the other APIs where the retry has somehow bitten people? (... checks Google ... can't find anything - the only cases I could imagine it would be a problem would be the non-idempotent ones, incrementing counters, non-conditional updates, etc)

[jed]

it's not that you wouldn't want to retry so much as you may want to retry on your own terms. but the more i think about it, the less i'm inclined to expose it. perhaps setting maxRetries for a client is enough?

[mhart]

Yeah - I think that'd be perfect - then if someone doesn't want to (which I'm pretty sure would not be the norm), then they can specify 0 maxRetries or whatever.

[mhart]

Perhaps down the track you could allow tuning of the backoff, allow a retry function to be passed in, something like that.

[jed]

by the way, this has been added to jed/dynamo-client@efd8e0d.

[mhart]

Schweeet