Absolutely, individual atomic side effects need to be idempotent. We can't solve the fundamental distributed system problem there (eg an HTTP 500 - did it actually get executed) However, the string of operations doesn't need to be idempotent - lets say your handler does 3 tasks A B C, and the machine dies at C. Only C will be re-executed. A and B need to be atomically idempotent, but once we move on, we don't start again

Critical point - its much easier to think about and test for the re-execution of C in a vacuum, than to test for A B C all re-executing in sequence, with a variable number of those having already executed before