Restartactions

Restartactions refers to a mechanism or pattern in software engineering and systems administration for orchestrating the steps required to restart a component after a failure or shutdown. It encapsulates the decision logic, sequencing, and policy that govern how and when restarts occur, what prerequisites are checked, and how recovery is validated.

A restartactions module typically specifies triggers (such as health check failures, process exit codes, or manual signals), the set of actions to perform (graceful shutdowns, resource cleanup, configuration reloads, process restart), and the post-restart verification (health probes, readiness signals). It may also include constraints like dependency ordering, timeouts, retry limits, and rollback procedures if a restart fails repeatedly.

In practice, restartactions appear in operating systems, container orchestration, and resilience libraries. In containers, for example, restart policies define whether a failed container should be restarted; more sophisticated restartactions layers add pre/post hooks and health-based decision making. In application code, a RestartActions component can be a configurable sequence that is invoked by a supervisor or fault handler.

A typical configuration might specify: on failure of service A, perform graceful shutdown, release resources, wait 2 seconds, restart A, check service A health every 5 seconds for 3 checks, if still unhealthy restart B or escalate.

See also fault tolerance, high availability, resilience, health checks, lifecycle management.