Best practices with HttpClient and Retry Policies with Polly in .NET Core 2, Part 2

• Best practices with HttpClient and Retry Policies with Polly in .NET Core 2, Part 1
• Best practices with HttpClient and Retry Policies with Polly in .NET Core 2, Part 2

Introduction

Because we chose the implementation strategy with the client typed, we will be able to implement and easily set our Retry Policies and Circuit Breakers in one place rather than in the implementation of our services that consume each HttpClient. Our services will then be completely agnostic of policies.

Requirements

We are using Polly to build policies. We will need to donwload this Nuget package:

PM> Install-Package Polly.Extensions.Http 

Building our policies

Create a configuration pour our policies

To build our policies we will need two configurables values:

• RetryCount: number of retries before breaking our app with a CircuitBreaker Policy, needed also in our RetryPolicy too.
• BreakDuration: number of seconds that the application will be broken by the CircuitBreaker.

The reason that I added interfaces is I want to abstract the configuration in Policies implementation. I will explain it below.

In this configuration I put 3 retries, and 30 sec of break duration.

That’s mean after 3 retries, I will break HttpClient call automatically during 30 seconds to let the system recover by itself, it saves performances instead of let each call breaking by the same transient error.

Create a base PolicyBuilder

This base PolicyBuilder will simply define common rules to apply to our policies. In our case we want to execute our policies on transient errors (5xx) and timeout errors (408) with the method HandleTransientHttpError(). Here is what it looks like:

Create a Retry Policy from the base PolicyBuilder

Here we are! let’s see how we are using configuration that we defined before to build our policy. We also need a logger, we will use ILogger to log retries with the http status code, the retry count and the duration before the next retry. The OnHttpRetry method will execute the logging. We need to compute at each retry the duration before the next retry: each retry takes more time to occur because we want to maximize the probability the remote source to recover by itsself with the time, then the method ComputeDuration will compute the retry count number by an exposant of 2, plus a random duration between 0 and 100 millisecond called “Jitter” in order to limit retries on the server at the same for performance reasons.

Create a Circuit Breaker Policy from the base PolicyBuilder

Let’s use here the configuration as well to define after n times the Circuit Breaker will operate with its configurable duration. The break will occur after (RetryCount + 1)th retry, it means after (if we chose 3 as RetryCount) the 4th retry consecutive failed retry will generate a break. The event method
OnHttpBreak is fired when the break occurs and logs a warning to indicate the http call won’t work during a certain BreakDuration and will generate a application failure for the current execution context with the BrokenCircuitException. We also implement another event method named OnHttpReset that will log a message when the break ends.

Create extensions on IHttpClientBuilder to add our policies on Typed Clients

In these extensions we need the PolicySectionName to locate our configuration in the appsettings.json, ILoggerFactory to create loggers for each policy classes and IConfiguration to access to configuration.

The AddPolicyHandlers adds our Retry Policy and our CircuitBreaker Policy and passes respective configuration to each policy.

Startup.cs with Http Typed Client and policies:

Conclusion

You know now how to make resilient http calls in your application. I showed you how to use correctly HttpClient and how to apply on it Policies with the right way. Hope this tutorial will help you 🙂