How Does One Gracefully Retry Third-party API Calls In Spring Boot?

Kyle Evans
5 min readApr 9, 2024

Elevate Your Spring Boot Projects with Robust Retry Patterns for External API Calls

1 Application Scenarios

In practical applications, it is often necessary to invoke third-party APIs to fetch data or perform specific actions. However, due to network instability or third-party service anomalies, API calls may fail. To enhance the stability and reliability of the system, implementing a retry mechanism is often considered.

This article will delve into how to elegantly retry third-party API calls in a Spring Boot project, supplemented by code examples to demonstrate the concrete implementation approach.

2 The Necessity of Retry Mechanisms

Third-party API calls may encounter various unpredictable issues, such as network timeouts and server failures. To address these issues, introducing a retry mechanism can assist us in:

  • Enhancing system stability: In the face of transient failures, a retry mechanism can mitigate the impact on the system, ensuring service availability.
  • Reducing poor user experience due to failures: Users may not perceive a brief failure, and a retry mechanism can automatically rectify issues without disrupting user operations.

3 Introduction to Spring Retry

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Kyle Evans
Kyle Evans

Written by Kyle Evans

Like Java development, Python development, AI, and LLM model.

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