How to think about durable execution
7 days ago
- #workflow-orchestration
- #durable-execution
- #task-queues
- Durable execution is a method for orchestrating and managing the state of interrelated tasks, often called workflows.
- Traditional task queues are used for background tasks that are too long-running or resource-intensive for API handlers.
- Task queues require a persistence layer (like Redis or RabbitMQ) to avoid losing messages if workers crash.
- Idempotency is crucial in task queues; tasks should have the same effect whether run once or multiple times.
- Complex tasks that aren't easily idempotent may require an orchestration engine or workflow engine.
- Durable execution platforms (like Temporal and Hatchet) persist intermediate workflow state in an external data store.
- Durable execution allows workflows to resume from checkpointed states, skipping already completed steps.
- Workflows must be deterministic; the order of subtasks cannot change between retries.
- Durable execution helps guard against unexpected infrastructure-level failures by resuming from the last checkpoint.
- Procedural workflow definition allows different execution paths between runs, useful for user-defined automations.
- Durable execution can skip intensive operations on retries, acting as a built-in cache.
- Durable execution is not a silver bullet; it has specific use cases and limitations.