The default in `requests` is not to retry and after thinking about how this looks at scale I think you're right to have Celery do the retry for us.  If we had the requests package do this the celery task could end up blocking for a long(er) period of time and during a major network outage this would lead to lots of other issues many of which would probably be worse than a task blocking.

Looks like you've switched over to the requests library in febc6101dd030ca4635303929ea78c8991386f20. I'd definitely keep using it even though I don't think we should be doing retries anymore.  The requests library will handle a lot more out of the box in a uniform fashion compared to if we did things like SSL, proxies, or http basic/digest auth ourselves.

PS: Since we're probably not going to be doing retries anymore but may at some point for other things what you'd need is an [an adapter](https://requests.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api/#requests.adapters.HTTPAdapter).