[secondrow]

(from DBOS) Great question. For better or worse, it seems like discussions about workflows and durable execution often intertwine. Usually ending up in what types of jobs or workflows require durable exec.

But really, any system that runs the risk of failing or committing an error should have something in place to observe it, undo it, resume it. Your point about "big enough scale" is true - you can write your own code to handle that, and manually troubleshoot and repair corrupted data up to a certain point. But that takes time.

By making durable execution more lightweight/seamless (a la DBOS or Restate), the use of durable execution libs become just good programming practice for any application where cost of failure is a concern.