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Comment by formalsystem | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know what are the best OSS Orchestration Engines? Am wondering what I should be comparing this to.

I don’t know about best, as there are lots of trade offs between various projects. I’ve reviewed and worked with a lot of Java based ones, top of mind:

- Airflow

- jBPM

- Enhydra Shark

- Activiti

- Netflix Conductor

Most of those are more workflow engine than pure orchestration.

A few years back, we searched high and low and I was generally unhappy with the commercial offerings so we wound up building around Netflix Conductor (after a disastrous run with Joget, which is built on Enhydra Shark).

Since then I’ve been pretty happy with Conductor, submitted numerous PRs and accidentally became one of the people keeping the MySQL backend implementation going forward.

AFAIK Netflix Conductor was inspired by the AWS Simple Workflow engine. The Cadence is a direct evolution of SWF in the open source world. I was tech lead for both of them :).

I guess technically Oozie is also a FOSS Java-based workflow/orchestration engine, except it's mostly for Hadoop jobs. Haven't used too many orchestration engines but I found Oozie very barebones

You may also want to look at Project Flogo (flogo.io) - in particular, the Flogo Flow action. It's a process engine in Golang that can be used to implement service orchestration, event-driven choreography integration patterns.

Flogo has been focused more on stateless service choreography running in Serverless FaaS or Edge devices - however the underlying process engine can be used to implement a long running orchestration process with fully externalized state for resilience and scale. It's 3-clause BSD including the modeling UI with hundreds of triggers and activity extensions in the community. We have a fairly active gitter channel in case you have questions for the core team (https://gitter.im/project-flogo/Lobby)

Disclaimer: I work at TIBCO & we provide commercial support for Project Flogo as well as use it in our commercial products.

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