On a cluster restart this pod can beat dex to serving, gets a 502 from ingress, and exits — after connecting postgres, backfilling 794 graph nodes and ingesting three session batches, all of which the restart redoes. Nothing was misconfigured; it started first. The validator now retries with bounded exponential backoff (8 attempts, 1s doubling to 30s) and is built immediately after ctx, before the watcher and the backfill. That second part is the other half of the issue: a genuine config error now fails in seconds rather than after all that work. Bounded on purpose. Retrying forever would convert a wrong issuer URL into a process that looks alive and never serves, which is harder to diagnose than a crash loop. startupretry.Do is generic and tested directly: transient-then-success, budget exhaustion surfacing the last error via errors.Is, prompt return on context cancellation, growing-and-capped delays, and a zero-value policy still making one attempt rather than silently succeeding. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BeAp5LTscnz2W7Ubt4eJ6m