Netflix Conductor- Handling retries and timeout

Orkes Team

January 25, 2022

Reading Time: 2 mins

What is Conductor

Conductor is a Microservices orchestration platform from Netflix, released under Apache 2.0 Open Source License.

Design for failures

Failures and service degradation are the fact of any system, this is especially true with large interconnected systems running in cloud. Conductor is designed with principles that systems can and will go down, degrade in performance and any dependencies should be able to handle such failures.

Tasks in Conductor

Conductor workflows are orchestration of many activities known as task. Each task represents a (ideally) stateless worker that given a specific input does the work and produces output. The tasks are typically running outside of Conductor server and there are many factors that could effect their availability.

Designing for failures

Conductor allows you to define your stateful applications that can handle failures and temporary degradation of services and without having to write code for that.

Configuring tasks to handle failures

Each task in Conductor can be configured how it responds to availability events such as: 1) Failures 2) Timeouts and 3) Rate limits.

Here is a sample task definition:

{
  "createdBy": "user",
  "name": "sample_task_name_1",
  "description": "This is a sample task for demo",
  "responseTimeoutSeconds": 10,
  "timeoutSeconds": 30,
  "timeoutPolicy": "TIME_OUT_WF",
  "retryCount": 3,
  "retryLogic": "FIXED",
  "retryDelaySeconds": 5,
  "rateLimitPerFrequency": 0,
  "rateLimitFrequencyInSeconds": 1
}

retry* parameters specify how to handle cases where the task execution fails and retries can be configured to be with fixed delay or exponential backoff. Similarly timeout* parameters specify how much time to give for task to complete execution and if the task should be marked as 'Timed Out' if it runs longer than that.