Retries and Timeouts

Timeouts and automatic retries are two of the most powerful and useful mechanisms a service mesh has for gracefully handling partial or transient application failures.

Timeouts and retries can be configured using HTTPRoute, GRPCRoute, or Service resources. Retries and timeouts are always performed on the outbound (client) side.

Note

If working with headless services, outbound policy cannot be retrieved. Linkerd reads service discovery information based off the target IP address, and if that happens to be a pod IP address then it cannot tell which service the pod belongs to.

These can be setup by following the guides:

Configuring Retries
Configuring Timeouts