Timeout resiliency policies

Network calls can fail for many reasons, causing your application to wait indefinitely for responses. By setting a timeout duration, you can cut off those unresponsive services, freeing up resources to handle new requests.

Timeouts are optional policies that can be used to early-terminate long-running operations. Set a realistic timeout duration that reflects actual response times in production. If you’ve exceeded a timeout duration:

• The operation in progress is terminated (if possible).
• An error is returned.

Timeout policy format

spec:
  policies:
    # Timeouts are simple named durations.
    timeouts:
      timeoutName: timeout1
      general: 5s
      important: 60s
      largeResponse: 10s

Spec metadata

| Field | Details | Example | | timeoutName | Name of the timeout policy | timeout1 | | general | Time duration for timeouts marked as “general”. Uses Go’s time.ParseDuration format. No set maximum value. | 15s, 2m, 1h30m | | important | Time duration for timeouts marked as “important”. Uses Go’s time.ParseDuration format. No set maximum value. | 15s, 2m, 1h30m | | largeResponse | Time duration for timeouts awaiting a large response. Uses Go’s time.ParseDuration format. No set maximum value. | 15s, 2m, 1h30m |

If you don’t specify a timeout value, the policy does not enforce a time and defaults to whatever you set up per the request client.

Next steps

• Learn more about default resiliency policies
• Learn more about:
  • Retry policies
  • Circuit breaker policies

Related links

Try out one of the Resiliency quickstarts:

• Resiliency: Service-to-service
• Resiliency: State Management