oxidecomputer / oxidecomputer/steno

Sagas need better handling of undo actions that fail

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Dominant language
Rust
Stars
170
Forks
15
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

The current implementation of sagas unwraps any failures from an undo action. This is not great for distributed systems where the saga actions cannot always control the state of the system their operating on. For example, one might run a saga recovery with a different version of software than ran the saga in the first place. In these cases, we'd probably like to design more nuanced error-handling that distinguishes types of such operational errors, indicates whether they're fatal or retryable, and maybe more.

It's also not clear how sagas handle invariants that they would like to assert. This would normally just abort/unwind the program, according to the disposition it was built with. One could imagine catching these and having some policy around retrying the operations, potentially up to some count, specified at creation time. It'll take some care to make sure we don't block multiple sagas, or worse, prevent those later sagas from ever running to completion if an earlier one fails.

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start in src/saga_exec.rs around line 1014, where failures from undo actions are unwrapped, and trace how saga recovery handles those errors. Review the invariant and retry concerns described in the issue before proposing the error categories and policy. Done should include an agreed design and tests covering fatal, retryable, and invariant-related failures.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
distributed-systems
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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