Throttled Retries Now Enabled by Default

Back in March (1.10.59), the AWS SDK for Java introduced throttled retries, an opt-in feature that could be enabled in the SDK ClientConfiguration to retry failed service requests. Typically, client-side retries are used to avoid unnecessarily surfacing exceptions caused by transient network or service issues. However, when there are longer-running issues (for example, a network or service outage) these retries are less useful. With throttled retries enabled, service calls can fail fast rather than retrying pointlessly.

After testing this code for the past five months, we’ve turned on throttled retries by default.

If you use Amazon CloudWatch to collect AWS SDK metrics (see this post for details), you’ll be pleased to know that there’s a new metric that tracks when retries are throttled. Look for the ThrottledRetryCount metric in the CloudWatch console.

Of course, this remains an option you can configure. If you don’t want to use throttled retries, you can disable the feature through the ClientConfiguration option like so:

ClientConfiguration config = new ClientConfiguration().withThrottledRetries(false);

Feel free to leave questions or feedback in the comments.