https://apicourse.com/tags/distributed-systems/ Recent content in Distributed Systems on API Course Hugo en-us Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://apicourse.com/idempotency-in-apis-building-operations-that-are-safe-to-retry/ Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://apicourse.com/idempotency-in-apis-building-operations-that-are-safe-to-retry/ <p>Networks fail. Connections drop. Load balancers time out. Servers restart mid-request. In a distributed system, any request that travels over a network can be sent but not confirmed, leaving the caller uncertain whether the operation completed. This is not a rare edge case — it is a routine condition that well-designed APIs must handle. Idempotency is the mechanism that makes retrying safe when certainty is unavailable.</p> <h2 id="what-idempotency-means">What Idempotency Means</h2> <p>An operation is idempotent if performing it multiple times produces the same result as performing it once. The outcome is identical whether you call it one time or ten times; subsequent calls do not change anything that the first call already changed.</p>