In distributed systems, retries are inevitable. From network errors to replication issues and even outages in downstream dependencies, services operating at a massive scale must be prepared to encounter, identify, and handle failure as gracefully as possible.

A Workflow is a series of decisions made by different people that determines what happens to a particular request that one of those people made, according to a defined and repeatable process. An example of this process is shown in this flowchart.

The core components of this architecture are a web front end that serves client requests, and a worker that performs resource-intensive tasks, long-running workflows, or batch jobs. The web front end communicates with the worker through a message queue.

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