Short answer: treat a rate-limit response during thumbnail upload as a scheduling problem, not as evidence that the object needs another upload attempt immediately. Bound concurrency per tenant, retry 429 responses with exponential backoff and Retry-After , and decide retention before the first thumbnail is written. In a media service serving generated reports to authenticated customers, that order matters because retrying aggressively increases request pressure while retaining every derivative increases the number of objects you must protect and later remove.

Suppose one report produces three thumbnails. Ten thousand reports create 30,000 upload requests and 30,000 retained objects if every derivative has one copy. A burst of 30,000 is a very different workload from the same 30,000 requests spread across a queue.…