Conductor - Scalable Workflow Orchestration

Conductor is an open-source orchestration engine built at Netflix to help developers manage microservices and event-driven workflows. Today, it’s actively maintained by the team at Orkes and a growing community of contributors.

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Table of Contents

1. What is Conductor?
   • Key benefits
   • Features
2. Getting Started with Docker
   • Requirements
   • Quick Start
   • Create your first workflow
3. Build from source
4. Documentation
5. Database Specifications
6. Conductor Roadmap
7. How to Contribute
8. Additional Resources
9. Community & Support

What is Conductor?

Conductor (or Netflix Conductor) is a microservices orchestration engine for distributed and asynchronous workflows. It empowers developers to create workflows that define interactions between services, databases, and other external systems.

Conductor is designed to enable flexible, resilient, and scalable workflows. It allows you to compose services into complex workflows without coupling them tightly, simplifying orchestration across cloud-native applications and enterprise systems alike.

Key benefits

• Resilience and Error Handling: Conductor enables automatic retries and fallback mechanisms.
• Scalability: Built to scale with complex workflows in high-traffic environments.
• Observability: Provides monitoring and debugging capabilities for workflows.
• Ease of Integration: Seamlessly integrates with microservices, external APIs, and legacy systems.

Features

• Workflow as code: Define workflows in JSON and manage them with versioning.
• Rich task types: Includes task types like HTTP, JSON, Lambda, Sub Workflow, and Event tasks, allowing for flexible workflow definitions.
• Dynamic workflow management: Workflows can evolve independently of the underlying services.
• Built-in UI: A customizable UI is available to monitor and manage workflows.
• Flexible persistence and queue options: Use Redis, MySQL, Postgres, and more.

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Getting Started with Conductor

Requirements

• Install Docker Desktop (Mac, Windows/PC, Linux)
• Install Java (JDK) 17 or newer
• Node 14 for the UI to build
  • Earlier versions may work, but are untested

Quick Start guide

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/conductor-oss/conductor

Change to new Conductor directory

cd conductor

Start with Docker Compose (recommended for local deployment)

docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.yaml up

Create your first workflow

With the UI:

• http://localhost:8127

Or the REST API with your preferred HTTP client:

• http://localhost:8080

Documentation

Check-out the Conductor docs for additional details

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Database Specifications

• The default persistence used is Redis
• The indexing backend is Elasticsearch (7.x)
• To use Opensearch (2.x), comment out Elasticsearch import so lucene dependencies don’t conflict server/build.gradle

Configuration for various database backends

Backend	Configuration
Redis + ES7	config-redis.properties
Postgres	config-postgres.properties
Postgres + ES7	config-postgres-es7.properties
MySQL + ES7	config-mysql.properties

Build from source

Build from source and deploy Conductor as a standalone Java application. Configure databases, queues, and environment settings as needed. Follow the Building Conductor From Source guide included in this repo.

Available SDKs

Conductor provides several SDKs for interacting with the API and creating custom clients:

• Java SDK: Fully featured for building and executing workflows in Java.
• Python SDK: Python library for creating and managing workflows.
• Javascript SDK: For integrating Conductor workflows with Javascript/Typescript-based services.
• Go SDK: For integrating Conductor workflows with Go-based services.
• C# SDK:The conductor-csharp repository provides the client SDKs to build task workers in C#

Each SDK is maintained as part of the Conductor project, providing examples and comprehensive API documentation.

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Contributing

We welcome contributions from everyone!

• Report Issues: Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on GitHub.
• Contribute code: Check out our Contribution Guide, and explore our Good first issues for beginner-friendly tasks to tackle first.
• Contribute to our Docs: Contribute edits or updates to keep our documentation in great shape for the community.
• Build a Conductor SDK: Need an SDK not available for Conductor today? Build your own using the Swagger API included with your local deployment.

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Community

Join the Conductor Slack channel for community discussions and support.

Contributors

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Conductor OSS Roadmap

See the roadmap for the Conductor
If you would like to participate in the roadmap and development, please reach out.

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License

Conductor is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License ©