Earlier versions of the driver allowed you to specify a retry policy. That is, if the attempted query should fail, the driver would automatically retry it under certain conditions.
Newer versions of the driver are deprecating some often-used policies, such as DowngradingConsistencyRetryPolicy. The reason for this is that query retry logic tends to be specific to the business requirements or use case, and should really be handled at the application level, not with the driver.