CHAPTER 14
Operational Resilience and Recovery
Design for interrupted work, uncertain outcomes, and tested recovery while keeping authority and service availability distinct.
- Confirmed state
- Interruption
- Reconciliation
- Recovery action
- Verified outcome
Resilience is the ability to keep an interrupted workflow understandable and restore the required service through an authorized process. It is broader than keeping a server running. A business needs to know which stages completed, which remain uncertain, who may act next, and whether recovery has been demonstrated under the conditions it depends on. Hybrid-Chain's separation of authority, lifecycle state, and evidence provides useful building blocks for that operating model.
Control and availability answer different questions
Customer authority over an asset does not establish that every service needed to use it is continuously available. Protected storage does not establish that the required retrieval route and key custody are available at a particular moment. A deployment should identify its necessary participants, interfaces, and operating responsibilities without treating a general product description as a continuity guarantee.
Health observations help locate an operational problem, but a healthy dependency does not grant signing authority or activate a funding route. Likewise, a public read model can be delayed while an authorized private operation has progressed. The application should tell a user whether it is reporting service health, published evidence, or authoritative operation state, and retain the observation time.
Preserve uncertainty instead of guessing
| Observed condition | Appropriate application behavior | Unsafe inference to avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication or authority denied | Stop the dependent action and use the responsible owner's approved access process. | Repeated retries or an older cached grant can replace current authority. |
| Write response lost | Reconcile through the documented operation record before deciding whether to retry. | A timeout means no side effect occurred. |
| Evidence service unavailable | Show the observation as unavailable and retain the last confirmed state with its time. | Missing evidence proves failure or an empty history. |
| One stage completed | Retain completed and unresolved stages separately and identify the responsible owner. | The entire business journey can be rolled back by changing a status label. |
Retries belong to the exact contract. If an operation defines an idempotency key, follow its payload and reuse rules for the same logical request. Signed-request freshness and replay protection are separate requirements. A new request identifier is not a recovery strategy when the original financial outcome is unknown; preserve that uncertainty until an authoritative read or an approved investigation resolves it.
Recovery has several distinct subjects
Service recovery restores a usable interface. Workflow recovery reconciles incomplete business work. Protected-data recovery demonstrates authorized retrieval of the intended information and a meaningful integrity check. Wallet recovery concerns restoration of the authority needed for the supported wallet operation. Success in one area does not prove success in the others.
Name the owner of each subject and document the supported process in the deployment's restricted operating material. This public chapter describes the responsibilities and observable acceptance conditions, not wallet recovery construction, signing coordination, or the internal arrangements between networks and co-locations. The evaluation should establish those operational commitments through the appropriate private review.
A continuity exercise that produces useful evidence
An exercise should begin with an agreed business outcome, a defined failure scenario, non-production material, and an authorized test procedure. Record the initial state and the dependencies required to restore the outcome. Set any recovery-time and acceptable-data-loss objectives before the exercise; report them as objectives until an observed test or contractual commitment supports a stronger statement.
- Choose a bounded interruption, such as an unavailable evidence read, a lost application response, or an agreed protected-document retrieval scenario.
- Keep credentials and recovery material outside public logs and preserve the references needed to reconcile the operation.
- Observe whether the client stops, retries, or escalates according to the specific contract and authority model.
- Check the final business result, integrity where applicable, duplicate work, elapsed recovery time, and remaining uncertainty.
- Record the tested configuration, responsible participants, observation date, and any dependency that was simulated rather than exercised.
Illustrative workflow: payment observed, fulfillment uncertain
A merchant's application loses its connection after submitting a supported order action. The user sees no confirmation. The recovery workflow inspects the existing order and its relevant payment and delivery records, rather than immediately creating another order or requesting another payment. If payment is confirmed but delivery is unresolved, finance and fulfillment retain different tasks and statuses.
An authorized fulfillment process can then reconcile the missing stage if the target deployment supports it. A refund or other financial correction remains a separately authorized operation. A useful exercise demonstrates that the application can explain the partial outcome and reach an evidenced resolution without duplicate value movement. It does not claim automatic compensation or rollback across independent systems.
FROM ARCHITECTURE TO INTERFACE
Engineering references
Readiness, settlement posture, and object evidence answer different recovery questions. None of these read operations restores authority or performs recovery.
Inspect public wallet readiness
Relate the wallet narrative to an inspectable readiness record.
GET/api/v2/explorer/mpc-wallets/{wallet_uuid}/operational-readiness- Observable result
- The public, read-only operational-readiness projection for the specified wallet.
- Authority and limits
- The projection does not grant authority or reveal the wallet's proprietary signing or recovery mechanisms.
Inspect settlement stages
Follow the actual state of the owner's settlement intents.
GET/api/v2/funding/settlement-intents- Observable result
- Authorization, reservation, signing, broadcast, and finality posture for the returned records.
- Authority and limits
- Reading these stages grants no authority to advance them; only join records supported by their actual references.
Inspect object metadata and evidence
Make the distinction between a private record and its permitted evidence concrete.
GET/api/v2/data-vault/objects/{object_uuid}- Observable result
- The owner-scoped object's minimized metadata and commitment-oriented evidence.
- Authority and limits
- A returned commitment is neither the file nor a decryption key, access grant, or recovery guarantee.
Selected operations were checked against the public OpenAPI contract on October 1, 2026. Links open documentation; they do not invoke an operation. Authentication, exact schemas, and deployment requirements remain defined by the current contract.
What a recovery result establishes
Retain the scope of the test alongside its outcome. Restoring one document with a particular configuration does not establish universal recoverability, and recovering from a simulated outage does not establish an independent exit route from every dependency. The useful result is a concrete account of what worked, what remained required, and what the business should improve before widening its reliance on the platform.