Each source runs as one supervised streaming process — the runner. You control its lifecycle from the source's detail page, and watch it live.
Where the runner actually runs is set by RUNNER_BACKEND, and each deployment picks it for you: the docker compose stack runs it as a sibling container (runner-<connector>) through the mounted Docker socket, and fabric-worker runs it as a Pod in its own release's namespace, created and deleted through the Kubernetes API. Same process, same image as the control plane, same single-reader rule — only the orchestrator differs.
The buttons
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Start Replication | Launches the per-source runner; it snapshots then streams changes |
| Stop Replication | Stops the runner gracefully |
| Restart | Restarts the runner with the current config |
| Reset Pipeline | Returns the source to a clean slate (see below) |
States you'll see
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
ready | Not streaming — a source that was never started, or that you stopped |
snapshotting | Loading the source's existing rows before following the change stream |
running | Streaming changes |
held | A preflight or schema-guard refusal — a named setting is wrong, not a crash loop |
reset | Reset finished: cursors cleared, destination tables dropped — Start takes a fresh snapshot |
deleted | The runner disappeared unexpectedly — a container removed by hand, or a Pod evicted from its node. Start recreates it |
resetting / deleting | In-flight reset or teardown — busy, not a failure |
The status surface distinguishes a crash from a human-decision failure, so a bad config shows as held — with the refusal message — rather than a crash loop.
Reset Pipeline
Reset Pipeline is the clean-slate option. Because cursors live in PostgreSQL rather than Kafka or Iceberg offset tables, reset is just: stop the runner, drop the replication slot (Postgres), clear the cursor, drop the destination tables, and restart — a fresh initial snapshot. No topic cleanup, no version bumping, no schema-history tombstones.
Where to watch it