The edge cases that break API integrations at 2am
Idempotency is not optional
Any write that can be retried must carry a key the receiving system will recognise. Without one, a network timeout on a successful request becomes a duplicate — and the duplicate usually appears during the busiest hour, which is when timeouts happen.
Pagination drifts under load
Offset-based pagination over a dataset being written to will skip and repeat records. Use cursors where the API offers them, and where it does not, sort by an immutable field and record your position rather than your page number.
Retry storms make outages worse
A fixed retry interval across many workers turns a brief vendor hiccup into a sustained flood. Exponential backoff with jitter, plus a circuit breaker that stops trying after a threshold, protects both systems.
Reconcile, do not assume
A nightly job that compares record counts and checksums on both sides catches the drift that monitoring misses. It is unglamorous, it takes an afternoon to write, and it will find something in the first week.
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