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DocumentationReliability

Best practices

Reliability practices

Design handlers and stream policies that remain safe under retries, partial failures, and traffic spikes.

Arc Runtime 3.xUpdated Jul 18, 2026

Make handlers idempotent

Use the Arc event ID as the idempotency key for every external write. Store completion with the business record when possible.

Bound retry work

  • Set a finite attempt count.
  • Use exponential backoff with a maximum delay.
  • Quarantine permanent failures.
  • Alert on quarantine growth, not individual retries.

Control load

Scale workers from delivery lag and lease pressure. Avoid scaling from producer request volume alone because routing fan-out changes downstream work.

On this page
  1. Make handlers idempotent
  2. Bound retry work
  3. Control load