[onetimeuse92304]

Used something very similar many times in my past without knowing it is formalised as a pattern.

For example, one application of this was a long migration project where a large collection of files (some petabytes of data) was to be migrated from an on-prem NAS to cloud filesystem. The files on NAS were managed with additional asset management solution which stored metadata in a PostgreSQL (actual filenames, etc.)

The application I wrote was composed of a series of small tools. One tool would contact all of the sources of information and create a file with a series of commands (copy file from location A to location B, create a folder, set metadata on a file, etc.)

Other tools could take that large file and run operations on it. Split it into smaller pieces, prioritise specific folders, filter out modified files by date, calculate fingerprints from actual file data for deduplication, etc. These tools would just operate on this common file format without actually doing any operations on files.

And finally tool that could be instantiated somewhere and execute a plan.

I designed it all this way as it was much more resilient process. I could have many different processes running at the same times and I had a common format (a file with a collection of directives) as a way to communicate between all these different tools.