Those are nice. The exponential backoff is the exception: it was the cause of much degradation in TCP. Just left unnecessary holes in service. Amazon ditched it in exchange for jitter for same reason but different problem. If using backoff, I suggest doing non-exponential where you tie it to likely disruption times w/ some error margin.

Another commenter mentioned testing. That's a good idea. Here's two articles on that:

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2800697

http://www.drdobbs.com/testing/testing-complex-systems/24016...