Retry Logic and Tiered Alerting in GitHub Actions

Short summary

This article teaches GitHub Actions pipelines to distinguish transient failures (registry timeouts, rate limits) from real ones. It provides a retry wrapper with exponential backoff and three-tier alerting: transient issues are retried silently, degraded services alert Slack, critical failures page PagerDuty. Includes a working FastAPI demo with Docker Compose for local testing.

• •Automatic retry with exponential backoff silences transient failures (503s, timeouts, registry flakes)
• •Three-tier alert classification routes severity appropriately (transient→silent, degraded→Slack, critical→PagerDuty)
• •Includes working Waybill demo (FastAPI + PostgreSQL) to test locally with Docker Compose

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