Abortingrestarting

Abortingrestarting is an informal term used to describe the handling of an operation that is aborted due to an error or timeout and then automatically restarted. It is not a formal concept in most standards, but it captures a common fault-tolerance pattern in software and systems design.

In practice, aborting a task means stopping it, potentially leaving partial work, while restarting means reinitializing the task, sometimes from a known good state or from the beginning.

Implementation patterns include retry with backoff, supervisor processes that monitor and immediately restart failed tasks (as in Erlang/OTP or systemd), container orchestrators that recreate unhealthy services, and techniques such as check-pointing and idempotent operations.

Use cases include transient failures, timeouts, or non-critical background tasks. Aborting and restarting is generally avoided for irreversible actions or where restarts could cause inconsistent state unless safeguards are in place.

Key considerations are data integrity and side effects, avoiding retry storms with backoff and jitter, ensuring observability through logs and metrics, and designing operations to be idempotent so repeats do not cause duplication.

Examples in practice include Kubernetes restarting containers after a crash, systemd restarting failed services, and fault-tolerant workloads in actor-based runtimes like Erlang/OTP.