Durable execution, the hard way
github.comI think the 80/20 solution for reliable workflows is:
- Ensure the workflow is idempotent - if it stops or fails at any point, you should be able to start it from scratch and skip / happily redo various elements.
- Store the messages which trigger workflows.
- Track failures (if your log aggregation is good, even that's enough to start).
Then when the odd thing fails (or sometimes a bunch of things fail, because e.g. a core integration goes down) you can lookup the messages and have a little script or tool to go and re-queue them. This is an easy starting point that can keep you going for a long time until you really approach huge scale.
I found the accompanying blog post excellent. In my experience, systems go from a monolith to a distributed monolith to a reliable distributed system. A durable workflow engine is one of the pieces that is required to get to target state.
Discussed a while back, for anyone interested:
How to think about durable execution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46245238 - Dec 2025 (37 comments)