Project: Hazelcast IMDG (App Definition and Development / Database)
File: 012-improved-job-resilience.md

title: 012 - Improved Resilience of Fault-Tolerant Streaming Jobs description: Make fault-tolerant streaming jobs capable of surviving fixable errors. Since: 4.3 Since streaming jobs with processing guarantees can't be re-run, like their non-fault-tolerant counterparts (or batch jobs), having them fail, can result in significant loss (in the form of irrecoverable computational state). We want them to be as resilient as possible and only ever fail due to the most severe of causes. Right now any failure, like exceptions in user code, null values in input and the likes, will stop the execution of a job. Moreover, not only does execution stop, but snapshots of the job are also deleted, so even if the root problem can be fixed, there is no way to recover or resume the failed job. We want to improve on this by only suspending jobs with such failures and preserving their snapshots. It might be argued that suspending a job on failure, instead of letting it fail completely is a breaking change, as far as behaviour is concerned. One might also argue that it's broken behaviour which just took a long time to fix. Anyways, to be safe, we might preserve the current behaviour as default and make the suggested changes optional. Maybe as a new element in `JobConfig`, called `suspendonfailure`, disabled unless otherwise specified. When we suspend a job due to a failure, we need to notify the client that submitted it and give enough information to facilitate the repair of the underlying root cause. We will add a `String getSuspensionCause()` method, which will return `Requested by user` if suspended due to a user request, or it will return the exception with stack trace as a string if the job was suspended due to an error. If the job is not suspended, the method will throw an

Do we always want to suspend jobs when there is a failure? It doesn't make sense to do it for failures that can't be remedied, but which are those? Hard to tell, hard to exhaust all the possibilities. Since the suspend feature will be optional and will need an explicit setting, it's probably ok to do it for any failure (not just some whitelisted ones). There is nothing to lose anyways. If the failure can't be remedied, then the user can just cancel the job. They will be no worse off than if it had failed automatically. It only makes sense to enable this feature for jobs with processing guarantees. Only such jobs have mutable state. For jobs without processing guarantees, the pipeline definition and the job config are the only parts we can identify as state, and those are immutable. Batch jobs also fall into the category of immutable state jobs. However, nothing is to be gained from restricting the cases when this behaviour can be set, so we will not do so for now. Once implemented, this feature will integrate well with existing enterprise functionality. When Jet suspends a job due to a failure, enterprise users will be able to export the snapshot, fix the problem (alter the DAG or the input data) and resubmit the job (via the _job upgrade_ feature). Ideally, when an error happens which will be handled by suspending the job, we would prefer to make all processors take a snapshot right then so that we can later resume execution from the most current state. But this, unfortunately doesn't seem possible. Snapshots can be taken only when all processors are functioning properly (due to the nature of how distributed snapshots happen). But, even some slightly obsolete snapshot should be better than losing the whole computation, so I guess this is a weakness we can live with. This functionality should be a solution of last resort, meaning that all errors that can be handled without user intervention should be handled automatically. For example sources and sinks losing connection to external systems should attempt to reconnect internally, back off after a certain number of tries, in general have their internal strategy for dealing with problems as much as possible.