Reconciliation and background behavior

Loopback is not only “API + database”. A task coordinator service runs scheduled reconciliation over many entity types so the desired state in the database matches reality in clouds, Kubernetes, DNS, and agents.

This page explains what that means for you as a user.

Why reconciliation exists

Infrastructure drifts:

Cloud APIs return timeouts; creates half-finish.
Agents miss heartbeats after network cuts.
DNS providers lag propagation.
Object storage policies change out-of-band.

Reconciliation retries, re-reads, and emits status so UIs and auditors see truth.

Major reconciled entities (user-visible)

From the scheduler configuration, these collections are examples of ongoing reconciliation (not exhaustive of every deployment fork):

Workspaces — cluster alignment, seeding, health (intervals around an hour; triggers on state/config change).
Workspace seeding — follow-up for Kubernetes seeding flags.
Scaling groups — desired vs actual host counts (frequent interval).
Load balancers — backend sync, certificate refresh triggers.
Compute providers — credential validation, inventory sync.
Object stores — usage tracking, policy sync.
Hosts — liveness, agent heartbeat checks (very frequent).
DNS zones and DNS records — sync and propagation checks.
Organizations — quota/billing alignment (daily-scale).
Agents — connectivity and version checks.
Update deliveries — staged rollouts of agent or platform updates.
Monitoring objects — probe execution and alert evaluation.
Monitoring sources — health of probe endpoints tied to agents/hosts.

Some entities (e.g. notification channels, monitoring alerts) are API-managed and not given a reconciliation routine in the registry — they are consumers of other jobs.

Triggers vs schedules

Each entity may reconcile on:

Fixed interval (every minute, hour, …).
Events such as entity.state_changed, host.heartbeat_missing, monitoring.config_changed.

User impact

Changes you make may not reflect instantly in every cloud; allow minutes for convergence.
Repeated flickering status often means flapping dependencies (DNS, provider API, agent offline).

Agents and heartbeats

Hosts and agents participate in fast loops. If an agent stops heartbeating:

Host may move to degraded states.
Monitoring sources may flag unavailable.
Automatic remediation may be operator-defined (replace node, open ticket).

Tasks you enqueue vs reconciliation you inherit

User/API initiated tasks — create workspace, upgrade Kubernetes, deploy bundle — are explicit jobs.