January 2023 Summaries

January marked a busy and productive month for Orkes, highlighted by the Conductor Developer Meetup co-hosted with Netflix, which featured discussions from industry leaders like Joseph Karp from United Wholesale Mortgage and Orkes' CTO, Viren Baraiya. The meetup showcased Conductor's advantages in microservices deployment, particularly in error handling and visibility, and introduced new features such as Webhooks, Secrets, and Tags. The event concluded with a Q&A session and is available for viewing on YouTube. Looking ahead, Orkes announced its participation in DeveloperWeek 2023, where CTO Viren Baraiya will discuss building and scaling distributed stateful applications. The company is eager to maintain its positive momentum throughout the year.

The blog post provides a guide on creating a checkout application using Next.js and Conductor, an orchestration platform for building distributed applications. It outlines the necessary setup, including ensuring the correct version of Node.js and the availability of TCP port 3456, and describes how to set up a Conductor server locally or via Orkes Cloud. The application uses workflows in Conductor, which consist of tasks that orchestrate the checkout process, such as waiting for order confirmation and checking user credit. Tasks are executed in a specified order to ensure process completion despite potential system failures. The blog also highlights Conductor's ability to offer a visual representation of workflows, aiding in monitoring and troubleshooting. The post concludes by inviting developers to build their own applications and engage with the Orkes community for support.

Conductor, a platform for service orchestration, enables developers to build stateful applications in the cloud without concerns about resiliency, fault tolerance, or scalability. A benchmark experiment demonstrated Conductor's scalability, testing its capacity to handle significant workloads using a single-node setup on a MacBook Pro. The experiment measured throughput and latency, achieving consistent task execution at over 1450 tasks per second and processing data at approximately 80 MB/sec. The setup involved a simulation of a sustained workload of 210 workflows per second, which translates to about 540 million workflows monthly. Utilizing tools like wrk2, Prometheus, and Grafana, the experiment confirmed Conductor's ability to scale, emphasizing the importance of optimizing server configurations and using Redis and Postgres efficiently. Conductor's stateless server design allows horizontal scaling, and with adequate hardware and configuration, it can handle billions of workflows monthly. Founded by the original Netflix Conductor engineers, Orkes offers a managed service version of Conductor, available for developers interested in exploring its capabilities.

The digital payment sector saw a significant increase after the 2019 pandemic, leading to a rise in fraudulent transactions and prompting financial institutions to seek efficient solutions for dispute resolution. Conductor, a microservice orchestration platform, offers a promising approach by enabling the creation of workflows that streamline the resolution of such disputes in fintech applications. The platform stands out due to its native support for retries, scalability, ease of debugging, workflow visualization, and language agnosticism, making it an attractive choice for developers looking to build resilient and adaptable applications. By simplifying the development process and allowing for seamless integration of new features, Conductor enhances productivity and operational efficiency, addressing the primary challenges of handling fraudulent transaction disputes.

In December 2022, the Orkes team concluded a year of notable developments and events, highlighted by the introduction of a new "Start Workflow" task that enables starting another workflow independently of its completion. The team actively participated in several significant developer events, including DevFest Goa and DevFest Noida in India, where their Developer Relations Engineer, Cherish Santoshi, discussed building distributed and resilient applications using Conductor. Additionally, Orkes' CTO, Viren Baraiya, shared insights at the Google Cloud for Startup Community event in California, discussing how Conductor aids startups in scaling with cloud services, addressing an audience of early-stage founders and venture capitalists. The team expressed gratitude for community support and optimism for continued growth in 2023.