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Idempotency key best practices for safe POST

POST is not naturally idempotent; APIs use Idempotency-Key to avoid duplicate charges or side effects. Keys should be unique per logical operation, stable on client retries, and often UUID-shaped.

Common causes

  • Reusing one key for different payloads.
  • Missing key on retried POST.
  • Invalid format rejected by the API gateway.

How to fix

  • Generate UUID v4 per operation.
  • Validate header format with Idempotency Key Checker.
  • Store key → result mapping for the TTL.