Idempotency: The Bug You Don't Notice Until Production

Idempotency is a crucial concept in distributed systems where a single event can be delivered multiple times due to network failures or retries. This can lead to duplicate processing and updates in the database. To ensure business operations remain correct, systems must be designed to handle idempotent operations, where repeating an operation produces the same final result as performing it once. This requires considering the transport layer's potential for multiple deliveries and implementing measures to prevent duplicate processing.