Hi! As I was reading the documentation on ISM policies and configuring retries for them:
I am a little confused on the meaning of “backoff” and “delay” in this context. If a “delay” of 1 minute is set does this delay increase with each iteration if backoff type is defined as “exponential”? Or does this refer to some other process?
Sorry if this is obvious I’m just a little confused.
The “exponential” backoff parameter in this context refers to the strategy used for retrying actions after a failure. In simple terms, it means that each time an action fails and needs to be retried, the system waits for a gradually increasing amount of time before trying again.
For example, if the initial delay is set to 3 minutes ("delay": "3m"), the first retry would wait 3 minutes, the second retry would wait longer (e.g., 6 minutes), the third retry even longer (e.g., 12 minutes), and so on. The delay between retries keeps increasing exponentially, which helps to avoid overloading the system by retrying too frequently in the case of persistent failures.
The exponential backoff works by multiplying the base delay (3 minutes in this case) by an increasing power of 2 for each retry. The relation can be expressed like this:
So, the pattern follows the general formula:
Where n is the retry attempt (starting from 0). This is why the delays grow exponentially (3, 6, 12, etc.).