February 2022 Summaries

Orkes Cloud has launched as a hosted service for Conductor, following extensive beta testing, offering users a streamlined experience by handling setup, maintenance, and management of high-performance clusters while providing enterprise features like role-based access control and single sign-on. Users can benefit from flexible data hosting and scalable compute options, with a free plan available or a pay-as-you-go enterprise plan. Orkes emphasizes its commitment to the open-source community by collaborating with Netflix on the Conductor roadmap and has secured $9.3 million in funding from prominent investors, including Battery Ventures and Vertex Ventures US, to expand its team and enterprise ecosystem. The founders, who previously worked with Conductor at Netflix, aimed to address the operational challenges of hosting and managing microservices-based architectures, which they observed as increasingly prevalent in fast-growing companies. Through Orkes, they aim to alleviate the burden on developers who otherwise spend significant time on non-core tasks like availability and security patching, allowing them to focus on innovation and building applications.

In February 2022, the first meetup on Netflix Conductor, co-hosted by the Netflix Conductor team, featured presentations from Maros Marasalek of FRINX and Nick Tomlin of Netflix, highlighting the integration of Conductor into FRINX products and its use in Netflix's finance team to facilitate workflow sharing among teams. The meetup included discussions on Netflix Conductor's open-source roadmap and introduced Orkes, alongside a Q&A session addressing performance metrics and integration capabilities of Conductor, such as its scalability and potential for integration with AWS Lambda. The conversation also touched on Netflix's use of Temporal.io for workflow orchestration by specific teams and discussed future feature releases and alternative solutions to Dynomite, emphasizing community engagement through forums like GitHub and Slack for further support.

The blog post discusses the use of subworkflows in an image processing workflow implemented with Netflix Conductor, highlighting the benefits of abstraction and reuse in microservices. Initially, tasks like image resizing and uploading to S3 were handled individually or in parallel forks, but the introduction of subworkflows allows these repetitive tasks to be encapsulated into a single, reusable unit. This not only simplifies the workflow by reducing complexity and code repetition but also ensures consistency across workflows, as updates to the subworkflow automatically propagate to all instances where it's used. Although the immediate code reduction might not be substantial, the true benefit lies in the streamlined management and maintenance of more complex workflows.