automatic recovery
**Automatic recovery** is the **self-managed restart and continuation workflow triggered by training or infrastructure failure events** - it removes manual pager-based intervention and shortens downtime after faults.
**What Is Automatic recovery?**
- **Definition**: System capability to detect failure, relaunch workload, and resume from valid state automatically.
- **Trigger Sources**: Heartbeat timeouts, process exit codes, scheduler eviction signals, and health-check failures.
- **Recovery Inputs**: Latest durable checkpoint, job specification, and resource availability rules.
- **Control Logic**: Includes retry limits, exponential backoff, and escalation policies.
**Why Automatic recovery Matters**
- **Downtime Reduction**: Automated recovery starts immediately, minimizing idle cluster time.
- **Labor Efficiency**: Fewer manual restarts reduce operator burden and off-hours interruptions.
- **Consistency**: Standardized recovery workflow avoids ad hoc human error during incidents.
- **Higher Completion Rates**: Long training jobs survive transient infrastructure faults more often.
- **Operational Maturity**: Self-healing behavior is core to dependable platform service levels.
**How It Is Used in Practice**
- **Watchdog Integration**: Use orchestration controllers to monitor liveness and enforce restart policy.
- **Checkpoint Selection**: Automate restore from last confirmed checkpoint with integrity validation.
- **Escalation Design**: Route repeated-failure cases to humans only after policy thresholds are exceeded.
Automatic recovery is **a critical self-healing capability for production ML infrastructure** - fast autonomous restart keeps training pipelines resilient and predictable.