The hardware resources that our application needs might or might not be available at any given point in time. Moreover, even if some resources were to be available at some point in time, nothing guarantees that they will stay available for much longer. A problem we can face related to this is network glitches, which are quite common in many environments (especially for mobile apps) and which, for most practical purposes, are indistinguishable from machine or application crashes.

Applications using a distributed computing framework or job scheduler can often rely on the framework itself to handle at least some common failure scenarios. Some job schedulers will even resubmit our jobs in case of errors or sudden machine unavailability.

Complex applications, however, might need to implement their own strategies to deal with hardware failures. In some cases, the best strategy is to simply restart the application when the necessary resources...