Designing Resilient Workflow Engines
Patterns for building workflow engines that survive retries, partial failures, and long-running state.
1 min read
- workflows
- orchestration
- reliability
Workflow engines fail in predictable ways. The trick is designing for those failures up front instead of patching them in production.
Idempotency First
Every step in a workflow must be safely re-runnable. If a step charges a customer or sends an email, it needs an idempotency key:
interface StepExecution {
readonly stepId: string;
readonly idempotencyKey: string;
readonly attempt: number;
}Durable State
State transitions belong in a database, not in memory. A workflow that lives only in RAM dies with the process.
Explicit Compensation
When step four fails, steps one through three may need undoing. Model compensation as first-class steps, not as exception handlers.
Placeholder post — replace with a real article before launch.