Joined 4 years ago
The differences are in the implementation and DX: the programming abstraction, how easy recovery/debugging is, and how it behaves once you're running a production cluster.
One thing that bit us early was versioning. In practice, you always end up with different workers running different code versions (rolling deploys, hotfixes, etc.). We spent a lot of time there and now support both workflow versioning and patching, so old executions can replay deterministically while still letting you evolve the code.
Curious how Oban handles versioning today?
1. DBOS built durable workflows and queues on top of Postgres (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of DBOS), with some recent discussions here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840693
2. Absurd explores a related design as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45797228
Overall, it's encouraging to see more people converging on a database-centric approach to durable workflows instead of external orchestrators. There's still a lot of open design space around determinism, recovery semantics, and DX. I'm happy to learn from others experimenting here.
> During replay, your code runs from the beginning but skips over completed checkpoints, using stored results instead of re-executing completed operations. This replay mechanism ensures consistency while enabling long-running executions. > > ... During replay, your code runs from the beginning but skips over completed checkpoints, using stored results instead of re-executing completed operations. This replay mechanism ensures consistency while enabling long-running executions.
(Disclosure: I work on DBOS [1]) The author's point about the friction from explicit step wrappers is fair, as we don't use bytecode generation today, but we're actively exploring it to improve DX.
I asked their main developer Dillon about the data/durability layer and also the compilation step. I wonder if adding a "DBOS World" will be feasible. That way, you get Postgres-backed durable workflows, queues, messaging, streams, etc all in one package, while the "use workflow" interface remains the same.
Here is the response from Dillon, and I hope it's useful for the discussion here:
> "The primary datastore is dynamodb and is designed to scale to support tens of thousands of v0 size tenants running hundreds of thousands of concurrent workflows and steps."
> "That being said, you don't need to use Vercel as a backend to use the workflow SDK - we have created a interface for anyone to implements called 'World' that you can use any tech stack for https://github.com/vercel/workflow/blob/main/packages/world/..."
> "you will require a compiler step as that's what picks up 'use workflow' and 'use step` and applies source transformations. The node.js run time limitations only apply to the outer wrapper function w/ `use workflow`"
