Designing resilient networked installations

Public installations fail in ordinary ways: Wi-Fi roams, browsers sleep, devices restart, and venues briefly lose internet access. A resilient system treats those events as expected state changes.

Build for interruption

• Reconnect with bounded exponential backoff rather than a fixed rapid loop.
• Treat presence as a current observation, not a permanent identity record.
• Use retained history when a late-joining client needs recent context.
• Keep a local safe state for moments when live data is unavailable.
• Monitor the public health endpoints from outside DataNet's own infrastructure.

The best recovery path is usually boring and automatic. Make disconnection visible in operator tools, but do not require an operator to restore the normal message flow.