alt Hacker NewsDBOS is amazing when it comes to Durable Workflows. There are others in the space - the most popular one being Temporal but I argue, Temporal is also the most complicated one. I often say Temporal is like Kubernetes while DBOS is like `docker compose`. (and for those taking me literally, you can use DBOS in Kubernetes!)
I don't realize why DBOS is not nearly as popular as Temporal but it has made a world of difference building Durable Queues and Long Running, Durable Workflows in Python (it supports other languages too).
As they show in this article, Postgres scales impressively well (4 billion workflows per day, on a db.m7i.24xlarge, enough for most applications), which is why, if you have your PostgreSQL backup/restore strategy knocked out and dialed in, you should really take a close look at DBOS to handle your cloud agnostic or self hosted Durable Queues and Durable Workflows. It's an amazing piece of software founded by the original author of Ingres (precusor to Postgres - the story of DBOS itself is captivating. I believe it started from being unable to scale Spark job scheduling)
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Are you using Temporal with distributed workers?
We have a simple worker setup and temporal is pretty easy to setup
Out only issue is really needing an intermediary data store for task result storage
We are using DBOS in new projects as it's even simpler and the downside (task log interface behind saas) is easily remedied with a copilot generated task viewer
The reason that DBOS isn't as popular is because it's younger. DBOS launched in the form we know it in 2024. Temporal is much older; Temporal is technically a fork of Cadence and Cadence released originally in 2017, with Temporal forking and releasing back in 2020. When all three are trying to be "the same sort of thing" and that thing is new, it's hard to show up 7-8 years after the trailblazers and say "oh yeah, we're clearly better" when the existing thing works and is used by tons of folks.
DBOS looks simple (good), but from the docs below, executor elasticity appears to be locked behind license purchase. So it truly is like docker compose, good and bad parts?
https://docs.dbos.dev/production/workflow-recovery#recovery-...
>When self-hosting in a distributed setting without Conductor, it is important to manage workflow recovery so that when an executor crashes, restarts, or is shut down, its workflows are recovered. You should assign each executor running a DBOS application an executor ID through DBOS configuration. Each workflow is tagged with the ID of the executor that started it. When an application with an executor ID restarts, it only recovers pending workflows assigned to that executor ID.
https://docs.dbos.dev/production/hosting-conductor
> Self-hosted Conductor is released under a proprietary license. Self-hosting Conductor for commercial or production use requires a paid license key.