· 10 min read
You Cannot Cancel What Does Not Heartbeat: Cooperative Cancellation And The Button That Does Nothing
In at least one widely used workflow engine, cancellation is delivered only to work that heartbeats. Wrap a command-line process that never reports in, and the cancel control returns successfully, the orchestrator marks the task cancelled, and the process keeps running and keeps spending. Cancellation is cooperative almost everywhere, which means it is a protocol the work has to participate in, and a timeout is the only non-cooperative backstop.