Sounds exactly like how Temporal markets itself.
I find that the burden of creating idempotent sub-steps in the workflow falls on the developer, regardless of checkpoints and state management at the workflow level.
Yes, in any durability framework there's still the possibility that a process crashes mid-step, in which case you have no choice but to restart the step.
Where DBOS really shines (vs. Temporal and other workflow systems) is a radically simpler operational model--it's just a library you can install in your app instead of a big heavyweight cluster you have to rearchitect your app to work with. This blog post goes into more detail: https://www.dbos.dev/blog/durable-execution-coding-compariso...
Oh I see. Seems Nextflow is a strong contender in the serverless orchestrator market (serverless sounds better than embedded).
From what I can tell though,
NF just runs a single workflow at a time, no queue or database. It relies on filesystem caching for "durability". That's changing recently with some optional add-ons.
> Yes, in any durability framework there's still the possibility that a process crashes mid-step, in which case you have no choice but to restart the step.
Golem [1] is an interesting counterexample to this. They run your code in a WASM runtime and essentially checkpoint execution state at every interaction with the outside world.
But it seems they are having trouble selling into the workflow orchestration market. Perhaps due to the preconception above? Or are there other drawbacks with this model that I’m not aware of?
KraftyOne|5 months ago
Where DBOS really shines (vs. Temporal and other workflow systems) is a radically simpler operational model--it's just a library you can install in your app instead of a big heavyweight cluster you have to rearchitect your app to work with. This blog post goes into more detail: https://www.dbos.dev/blog/durable-execution-coding-compariso...
jiggunjer|5 months ago
From what I can tell though, NF just runs a single workflow at a time, no queue or database. It relies on filesystem caching for "durability". That's changing recently with some optional add-ons.
bjornsing|4 months ago
Golem [1] is an interesting counterexample to this. They run your code in a WASM runtime and essentially checkpoint execution state at every interaction with the outside world.
But it seems they are having trouble selling into the workflow orchestration market. Perhaps due to the preconception above? Or are there other drawbacks with this model that I’m not aware of?
1. https://www.golem.cloud/post/durable-execution-is-not-just-f...