I think errors and failures get often conflated. There are truly exceptional situations where your application can do nothing and will just have to abort (passi

I think errors and failures get often conflated. There are truly exceptional situations where your application can do nothing and will just have to abort (passing off the failure to a higher layer in the system) but often failures aren't really exceptional. You can not assume that your database connections live forever, for example, and it's not an error when a commit fails due to an interrupted network connection. Such cases need to be handled. If you know that an operation is unreliable, you need to add retry / recovery logic and perhaps log or increment a metric that you can track what's going on; a high number of failures often indicates an exceptional situation. In some cases, your retry logic will be a "Please try again" message to the user. I think that's perfectly acceptable, but you'll still want to know about it.