News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ask HN: Whats a Build vs. Buy decision that you got wrong?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Whats a Build vs. Buy decision that you got wrong? by zaptheimpaler on Wednesday December 28, 2022 @03:27PM (#34165504)
What exactly is a workflow engine?

At a previous job, we had a fair amount of celery tasks and logic around starting them based on user input or on a schedule, retrying on failures and marking progress or cleaning up state in various databases.

Is that a workflow engine?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Whats a Build vs. Buy decision that you got wrong? by mrfox321 on Wednesday December 28, 2022 @06:34PM (#34167491)
Sure.

Open source analogue would be Apache Airflow.

Abstractly, it's some directed acrylic graph (DAG) that is asynchronously computed, sometimes on a schedule.

Unfortunately, most things fall under DAG. But the framework / engine exists to manage the complexity of the ever-extending pipelines declared by the engineers

Event/push-based workflows also fall under this taxonomy.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Whats a Build vs. Buy decision that you got wrong? by froh on Wednesday December 28, 2022 @10:48PM (#34169287)
why acyclic? review steps can send stuff back to previous input steps, can't they?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Whats a Build vs. Buy decision that you got wrong? by thesnide on Thursday December 29, 2022 @12:31PM (#34175205)
It is usually better to have explicit returns.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Whats a Build vs. Buy decision that you got wrong? by mrfox321 on Friday December 30, 2022 @01:29AM (#34182477)
Yeah, I mean, the computation can be re-materialized.

DAG may too specific. It's really a dependency graph, that likely has a DAG topology.

[ Parent | on HN ]