Jitter - CI/CD Glossary Definition

Jitter randomizes delays so retries and schedules do not all fire at once.

Jitter is random variation added to a delay, such as retry timing, so many clients do not retry at the exact same instant and overwhelm a service (the thundering herd problem).

Jitter spreads out timed actions by adding randomness. Combined with backoff it prevents synchronized retries from creating traffic spikes.

In CI

When many jobs retry a flaky dependency at once, adding jitter to the backoff avoids a synchronized retry storm that keeps the dependency overloaded.

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