In the challenging world of services, the HTTP client is an indispensable tool. Just make sure to properly configure it to make it work — and to work well:

• Use timeouts to avoid hanging requests

• Be prepared to handle inevitable errors

• Use retries to mitigate temporary network issues

• Log and monitor your HTTP client to understand what’s going on

• Be identifiable by the external service

• Mark your requests with unique identifiers to track them

• Keep configuration separated and easy to change

• Stream large files to avoid memory exhaustion

• Use persistent connections. HTTP caching and parallelism to improve performance

• Standardize the way your integrate with external services

• Do not be afraid to craft a full-featured HTTP client library

• Think about the layered structure of your HTTP client

• Prefer VCR in testing to bring scenarios nearer to the real world