Retries Will Bankrupt You Before Any Attacker Gets the Chance

I've watched a $40,000 AWS bill materialize in a weekend. No breach, no botnet, no disgruntled ex-employee with root access. Just a misconfigured retry policy on a Lambda-backed payment processor that hit a flaky downstream vendor API during a Saturday night deployment. Every timeout spawned three children. Each child could time out too. That’s the thing nobody tells you when they hand you the Polly documentation and say, “Add resilience.” Resilience, implemented carelessly, is just a different failure mode with a credit card attached.