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23 posts tagged with "orchestration"

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· 9 min read
Doug Sillars

There are many tools available to work with images - resizing, changing the format, cropping, changing colors, etc. Tools like Photoshop require a lot of manual work to create image. Online tools for image processing are also extremely popular. But, rather than doing the work manually, or paying for a service to modify your images, wouldn't it be cool to have a workflow that does image resizing for you automatically? In this post, we'll build just this using Conductor to orchestrate the microservices involved, and to create an API-like surface for image processing.

In this post, we'll run Conductor locally on your computer. The Conductor workflow consists of two tasks. The first task reads in an image and resizes it according to the parameters provided (labeled "image_convert_resize_ref" in the image below). The second task ("image_toS3_ref" below) takes the resized image and saves the it to an Amazon S3 bucket.

Diagram of our image processing workflow

Using a microservice architecture for this process allows for easy swapping of components, and allows for easy extension of the workflow - easily adding additional image processing steps (or even swapping in and out different processes for different workflows). We could also easily change the location of the saved file based on different parameters.

· 6 min read
Boney Sekh

Microservices have emerged as the dominant application development paradigm in the software world today. It has tremendous benefits both from a business and technical perspective due to its fundamental characteristics of agility, scalability, and resiliency.

However, implementing microservices are hard! The inherently distributed nature of this architectural pattern introduces complexity across multiple areas especially around Transaction Management, Data Consistency, and Process Automation. In a distributed system, Business Transactions can span across multiple services. Since we no longer have the ability to run a single ACID transaction, it requires careful coordination across these services to ensure that you have a consistent and reliable system at the end of a business process.

Solutions to solve this “coordination” problem have led to the rise of a new set of application patterns that can be broadly classified into two main groups - Choreography and Orchestration.