Deep dive into the Amazon Managed Service for Apache Fink application lifecycle – Part 2

This article by AWS Solutions Architects Lorenzo Nicora and Felix John explores failure scenarios and recovery strategies for Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink applications in production environments.

Building on their previous work on application lifecycle management, the authors address the reality that "everything fails, all the time" in distributed systems. They examine two primary failure modes: deployment failures that prevent applications from reaching a running state, and runtime failures that cause applications to enter fail-and-restart loops. The article provides comprehensive guidance on detecting these issues through monitoring techniques and implementing appropriate recovery strategies.

• Failure detection methods: Monitor the FullRestarts CloudWatch metric to identify fail-and-restart loops, and track application, job, and subtask statuses through APIs and the Flink Dashboard
• Recovery strategies: Utilize automatic system rollbacks, manual rollback operations, or force-stop procedures depending on the failure scenario and application state
• Operational best practices: Implement scheduled snapshots for production applications, set appropriate timeout values for operations, and use CloudWatch Logs Insights for continuous monitoring
• Downtime optimization: Understand how Managed Service for Apache Flink minimizes processing downtime during updates by preparing new clusters while keeping existing jobs running until the last moment