2 posts tagged with "dynamic fork"

In recent posts, we have built several image processing workflows with Conductor. In our first post, we created an image processing workflow for one image - where we provide an image along with the desired output dimensions and format. The workflow output a link on Amazon S3 to the desired file.

In the 2nd example, we used the FORK System task to create multiple images in parallel. The number of images was hardcoded in the workflow - as FORK generates exactly as many paths as are coded into the workflow.

As number of images is hardcoded in the workflow - only 2 images are created. When it comes to image generation, there is often a need for more images (as new formats become popular) or sizes - as more screens are supported.

Luckily, Conductor supports this flexibility, and has a feature to specify the number of tasks to be created at runtime. In this post, we'll demonstrate the use of dynamic forks, where the workflow splitting is done at runtime.

Learn how to create a dynamic fork workflow in this post!

In our previous post on image processing workflows, we built a Netflix Conductor workflow that took an image input, and then ran 2 tasks: The first task resizes and reformats the image, and the second task uploads the image to an AWS S3 bucket.

With today's varied screen sizes, and varied browser support, it is a common requirement that the image processing pipeline must create multiple images with different sizes and formats of each image.

To do this with a Conductor workflow, we'll utilize the FORK operation to create parallel processes to generate multiple versions of the same image. The FORK task creates multiple parallel processes, so each image will be created asynchronously - ensuring a fast and efficient process.

In this post, our workflow will create 2 versions of the same image - a jpg and webp.