Reconciliation Loops for Self-Healing Systems
Reconciliation Loops for Self-Healing Systems A one-shot operation works well when every step succeeds. Real systems are less cooperative. A process crashes after creating half its resources, an external API times out after accepting a request, an operator changes something manually, or a dependency becomes unavailable and recovers later. If correctness depends on one command completing perfectly, every interruption creates another recovery path to design and operate. A reconciliation loop uses a different model. Instead of saying, “perform these steps once,” the system repeatedly asks, “what should be true, what is true now, and what is the smallest safe action that moves reality toward the desired state?” That shift is useful for controllers, background jobs, provisioning systems, synchronizers, and any workflow where state can drift after the initial operation.