Announcing Automatic Plugin Retries
We’ve launched automatic retries for all plugins with an exponential backoff algorithm. 🤓
Today we’re announcing automatic retries for all our plugins. This means regardless of what plugins you add, from Airtable to Zendesk, you can rest assured that your form submissions will be processed.
Let’s say one of those services experiences an outage, or your form “goes viral” —- and gets rate limited, we’ll keep trying to send the data until it goes through.
This added reliability is available on all our Plans. It’s a huge benefit over wiring up your own serverless functions or (god forbid) sending API requests to 3rd parties directly from your frontend code.
Here’s how it works – each time we get an error, we’ll retry after adding a longer and longer delay. This approach is called “exponential backoff.” The goal is to keep trying until the request goes through, but without overwhelming the server.
This feature is super important because, as apps become more interconnected, there are more dependencies and potential points of failure to worry about. We want to make it as easy as possible to build a fast and reliable website with forms that you can trust to deliver your data. We carefully monitor our APIs with health-checks to ensure our own uptime, and now with plugin retries, we’re able to deal with interruptions across our 3rd party plugin network as well.
That’s it for this update, hopefully the next one WON’T follow an exponential backoff algorithm! 😜
To connect your forms to plugins, check out the plugins tab in the Formspree dashboard. If you have any thoughts or feedback, please post them below!