This patent document describes failure recovery technologies for the processing of streaming data, also referred to as pipelined data. The technologies described herein have particular applicability in distributed computing systems that are required to process streams of data and provide at-most-once and/or exactly-once service levels. In a preferred embodiment, a system comprises many nodes configured in a network topology, such as a hierarchical tree structure. Data is generated at leaf nodes. Intermediate nodes process the streaming data in a pipelined fashion, sending towards the root aggregated or otherwise combined data from the source data streams towards. To reduce overhead and provide locally handled failure recovery, system nodes transfer data using a protocol that controls which node owns the data for purposes of failure recovery as it moves through the network.