alt Hacker NewsDBOS 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.
This is a good question! No, it's not like docker compose (I imagine you implied the swarm and hub pull limits?)
DBOS Conductor is an out of band management service that IIRC helps you mainly observe your DBOS and recover failures in a seamless way. As far as I could see, it's not necessary, for you to use DBOS workflows and queues. Don't quote me though and reach out to their forum and verify in case I'm missing certain usecases.
Personally, I do not use DBOS Conductor - I have my own observable setup using Grafana/VictioriaMetrics as my workflows are instrumented with OTel. I had initially set Conductor up for development (and it looked to be free for development although I recall some major limitations on how many workflows etc - which is why I put my own alternate monitoring setup).
They also have a very reasonably priced cloud hosted DBOS Conductor. I think my first 30 days were completely free and then they moved me to a "hobby" tier. It's a fantastic way to help decide whether it's for you.
I believe DBOS Conductor is how DBOS pays the bills but you can use DBOS workflows and queues unlimited without DBOS Conductor. If you don't want to pay for Conductor - their out of band management service, you can put together your own just fine, like I did. My own Grafana/VictioriaMetrics setup answers my questions but I would imagine Claude/Codex/Cursor should be able to put something fairly useful if you didn't want to go down my route.
> executor elasticity appears to be locked behind license purchase
DBOS has designed their system to be extremely flexible and extensible. While yes, Conductor can absolutely manage your executors for you, it's not the only thing that can. You're not limited to using Conductor. As I said, I manage my own - everything you need to know to do so is in the code and documentation. They even have a document for LLMs and agents. I have had to interact with the DBOS team 0 times to set everything up.
I prefer this business model (an optional tool - Conductor, is paid) vs. DBOS offering just everything across the stack on a "free tier" but with caps on DBOS workflows and queues. In their current business model DBOS workflows and queues are completely uncapped (atleast from what I can make out).
If you do reach out to them, I would appreciate if you let me know anything to the contrary.