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Zombee.Buzz
PAPER

Project Lazarus — Autonomous Recovery at the Edge

Executive Summary

Section titled “Executive Summary”

Project Lazarus is a fictional recovery architecture designed to test an engineering-heavy paper on Zombee.Buzz. The system detects a degraded component, diagnoses the failure, selects a bounded recovery action, and validates the result.

Objectives

Section titled “Objectives”
  • Detect failure without depending on the failed component.
  • Prefer the least disruptive recovery action.
  • Escalate only after bounded retries.
  • Record enough evidence to explain what happened.
  • Confirm recovery rather than assuming success.

Autonomous recovery loop

Figure 1. Five explicit recovery phases.

Recovery State Machine

Section titled “Recovery State Machine”
HEALTHY
  |
  | heartbeat lost
  v
DEGRADED ---- retry succeeds ----> HEALTHY
  |
  | retry budget exhausted
  v
RECOVERY
  |
  +---- validation passes --------> HEALTHY
  |
  +---- validation fails ---------> ESCALATED

Example Policy

Section titled “Example Policy”
recovery:
  heartbeat_timeout: 30s
  retry_limit: 2
  actions:
    degraded:
      - restart_service
      - validate
    persistent_failure:
      - reboot
      - validate
    unrecovered:
      - enter_advanced_recovery
      - publish_incident

Simulated Results

Section titled “Simulated Results”
Failure Detection Recovery Result
Service crash 2.1 s 8.4 s Recovered
Agent hang 31.0 s 44.2 s Recovered
Corrupt state 30.8 s 2 m 18 s Escalated
Network loss 5.4 s — Degraded safely

Failure Walkthrough

Section titled “Failure Walkthrough”

Step 1 — Detect

Section titled “Step 1 — Detect”

The independent observer misses expected heartbeats and changes local posture.

Step 2 — Diagnose

Section titled “Step 2 — Diagnose”

The system distinguishes loss of the application from loss of the operating environment.

Step 3 — Recover

Section titled “Step 3 — Recover”

A policy engine selects the lowest-cost action still available under the retry budget.

Step 4 — Validate

Section titled “Step 4 — Validate”

Recovery is not complete merely because an action executed. The original evidence source must return and remain stable.

Open Questions

Section titled “Open Questions”
  • How much state should survive recovery?
  • Which evidence must be cryptographically verifiable?
  • Who owns policy when local and remote instructions conflict?
  • When should the system stop acting autonomously?

Conclusion

Section titled “Conclusion”

A useful recovery architecture is defined by how well it can detect, bound, explain, and validate its actions.