If you receive an INTERNAL error code from a Cloud Datastore request, what should you do?

When you receive an INTERNAL error code from a Cloud Datastore request, it indicates that there's a transient issue within the Cloud Datastore system. In such cases, the recommended practice is to implement a retry strategy, specifically using exponential backoff.

Exponential backoff is a standard error handling strategy for network applications in which the client increases the time between retries exponentially. This approach reduces the load on the server and allows time for transient issues to resolve themselves. By waiting progressively longer between retries, it minimizes the risk of overwhelming the service, which may be facing a temporary fault.

The other strategies do not align with best practices for handling internal errors. For example, simply retrying until the request succeeds without implementing a backoff strategy can lead to high levels of request traffic, potentially exacerbating the underlying issue. Similarly, retrying only if the problem is fixed or just retrying once fails to account for the nature of transient errors, where multiple attempts may be necessary for recovery. Thus, using exponential backoff is the most effective and standard approach to handle internal errors in Cloud Datastore.