Policies

Policies

You define timeouts, retries and circuit breaker policies under policies. Each policy is given a name so you can refer to them from the targets section in the resiliency spec.

Note: Dapr offers default retries for specific APIs. See here to learn how you can overwrite default retry logic with user defined retry policies.

Timeouts

Timeouts can be used to early-terminate long-running operations. If you’ve exceeded a timeout duration:

• The operation in progress is terminated (if possible).
• An error is returned.

Valid values are of the form 15s, 2m, 1h30m, etc.

Example:

spec:
  policies:
    # Timeouts are simple named durations.
    timeouts:
      general: 5s
      important: 60s
      largeResponse: 10s

Retries

With retries, you can define a retry strategy for failed operations, including requests failed due to triggering a defined timeout or circuit breaker policy. The following retry options are configurable:

The exponential back-off window uses the following formula:

BackOffDuration = PreviousBackOffDuration * (Random value from 0.5 to 1.5) * 1.5
if BackOffDuration > maxInterval {
  BackoffDuration = maxInterval
}

Example:

spec:
  policies:
    # Retries are named templates for retry configurations and are instantiated for life of the operation.
    retries:
      pubsubRetry:
        policy: constant
        duration: 5s
        maxRetries: 10

      retryForever:
        policy: exponential
        maxInterval: 15s
        maxRetries: -1 # Retry indefinitely

Circuit breakers

Circuit breakers (CBs) policies are used when other applications/services/components are experiencing elevated failure rates. CBs monitor the requests and shut off all traffic to the impacted service when a certain criteria is met. By doing this, CBs give the service time to recover from their outage instead of flooding them with events. The CB can also allow partial traffic through to see if the system has healed (half-open state). Once successful requests start to occur, the CB can close and allow traffic to resume.

Example:

spec:
  policies:
    circuitBreakers:
      pubsubCB:
        maxRequests: 1
        interval: 8s
        timeout: 45s
        trip: consecutiveFailures > 8

Override Default Retries

Dapr provides default retries for certain request failures and transient errors. Within a resiliency spec, you have the option to override Dapr’s default retry logic by defining policies with reserved, named keywords. For example, defining a policy with the name DaprBuiltInServiceRetries, overrides the default retries for failures between sidecars via service-to-service requests. Policy overrides are not applied to specific targets.

Note: Although you can override default values with more robust retries, you cannot override with lesser values than the provided default value, or completely remove default retries. This prevents unexpected downtime.

Below is a table that describes Dapr’s default retries and the policy keywords to override them:

The resiliency spec example below shows overriding the default retries for all service invocation requests by using the reserved, named keyword ‘DaprBuiltInServiceRetries’.

Also defined is a retry policy called ‘retryForever’ that is only applied to the appB target. appB uses the ‘retryForever’ retry policy, while all other application service invocation retry failures use the overridden ‘DaprBuiltInServiceRetries’ default policy.

spec:
  policies:
    retries:
      DaprBuiltInServiceRetries: # Overrides default retry behavior for service-to-service calls
        policy: constant
        duration: 5s
        maxRetries: 10

      retryForever: # A user defined retry policy replaces default retries. Targets rely solely on the applied policy. 
        policy: exponential
        maxInterval: 15s
        maxRetries: -1 # Retry indefinitely

  targets:
    apps:
      appB: # app-id of the target service
        retry: retryForever