# Retries & circuit breakers

A step of the [Cloud application](https://gradus.kazet.blog/tree/cloud-application) tree on Gradus, in the Testing & resilience area: Tests, errors, SLOs.

Page: https://gradus.kazet.blog/tree/cloud-application/step/retries-and-circuit-breakers

Add retry-with-backoff and circuit breakers around calls to external services, so one failing dependency can't cascade into a full outage.

Usually comes after: [Centralized error handling](https://gradus.kazet.blog/tree/cloud-application/step/error-handling).

Leads to: [Load & chaos testing](https://gradus.kazet.blog/tree/cloud-application/step/load-and-chaos-testing), [Timeouts & bulkheads](https://gradus.kazet.blog/tree/cloud-application/step/timeouts-and-bulkheads).

## Prompt for your AI assistant

```
Add retry-with-exponential-backoff and a circuit breaker around calls to external services and downstream dependencies.
```

Every step of the tree: https://gradus.kazet.blog/tree/cloud-application/llms.txt