December 2023 Summaries

Orkes Monthly Highlights for December 2023 reflect a transformative year for the Conductor developer community, marked by a transition as Orkes assumes stewardship of the Conductor OSS project from Netflix, which is focusing on its internal fork. The month featured significant events, including the APIDays Paris, Microservices and Orkes Conductor Meetup, and a virtual meetup co-organized with Netflix, highlighting topics like Retrieval Augmented Generation and event-driven distributed applications. Looking ahead, January 2024 promises virtual and in-person engagements such as the Virtual Conductor Meetup and several hackathons across India, fostering collaboration and innovation in open-source projects. The monthly update also places a spotlight on community member Ankit Agarwal, who utilized Conductor OSS to orchestrate a Digital Public Goods Compliant Payment Hub, and emphasizes recent resources and blog posts on integrating Orkes Conductor with tools like Opsgenie to meet SLA commitments.

Adopting a SaaS model with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) requiring 98% uptime necessitates efficient incident management to minimize downtime. Orkes Conductor, an orchestration platform based on Conductor OSS, and Opsgenie, an incident management tool, work together to promptly alert the correct teams when application failures occur. By integrating Orkes Conductor with Opsgenie, alerts for any application failures can be sent quickly, ensuring that developers or SRE teams can address issues rapidly, thereby adhering to the SLA's uptime requirement. A sample application can detect failures of a service app, send alerts via Opsgenie, and run scheduled checks every 30 minutes to maintain the required uptime. The flexibility of Orkes Conductor allows users to customize workflows according to their needs, and Orkes Cloud, available on major platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP, provides a robust framework for maintaining application reliability.

OpenMF's Payment Hub, originally relying on Camunda Zeebe for orchestration, has transitioned to using Conductor OSS to achieve Digital Public Goods (DPG) compliance in its microservice architecture. This shift involved a proof of concept (POC) aimed at enabling real-time transactions between payer and payee accounts while maintaining the existing architecture's ability to integrate with third-party payment providers. The POC involved setting up Conductor OSS, designing workflows, creating custom modules for exporting and importing workflow data, and utilizing the Orkes Developer Edition for workflow design, ultimately leading to a successful integration test. By using Conductor OSS, the Payment Hub improved its orchestration capabilities while adhering to DPG standards, ensuring its enterprise-grade infrastructure remains versatile and compliant.

The Conductor open-source project is entering a new phase as Orkes, founded by the original Netflix engineering team, takes on a greater role in its future development, focusing on community-driven innovation. While Netflix will concentrate on its internal use of Conductor, Orkes will steward the open-source project, aligning its roadmap with community needs and establishing a new repository for continuity. The initiative encourages active community participation, inviting members to contribute to the project's evolution by joining discussions and taking on stewardship roles. This transition marks a commitment to accelerating innovation with the community's interests at its core, ensuring Conductor continues to thrive and evolve.