Data that is collected and disseminated by mobile devices typically has to be processed, correlated with other data, aggregated, and then transmitted back to the mobile device users before the information becomes stale or otherwise irrelevant. These operations may be performed in a cloud-based solution that manages dataflow. The cloud-based solutions may be scalable and implemented in a fault-tolerant distributed system to support user-facing continuous sensing and processing services in the cloud-computing system. A system may monitor execution of data and shift workloads (i.e., balancing) in response to spatial and temporal load imbalances that occur in a continuous computing environment. A failure recovery protocol may be implemented that uses a checkpoint-based partial rollback recovery mechanism with selective re-execution, which may allow recovery of the continuous processing after an error while avoiding large amounts of downtime and re-execution.