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🌳 Idempotency is a property, not a mechanism

🌳 Idempotency is a property, not a mechanism

Jul 02, 20251 min read

Idempotency describes an outcome β€” applying an operation N times equals applying it once. Retries, dedup keys, and upserts are mechanisms that achieve it; none of them is idempotency.

Related

  • At-least-once delivery makes deduplication your job
  • Retries without backoff turn a blip into an outage
  • Cache invalidation fails at boundaries you don’t own

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Backlinks

  • 🌿 At-least-once delivery makes deduplication your job
  • 🌿 Cache invalidation fails at boundaries you don't own
  • 🌿 Retries without backoff turn a blip into an outage
  • 🌿 The outbox pattern gets you at-least-once without a shared database
  • Distributed Systems

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