What is workflow and workflow service?

General Discussions
1

Hello,

We having locally hosted mender 2.0.0, today while surfing the integration folder on the latest version 2.3, I saw the workerflow and workerflow-server and I see the reference to conductor service is no more seen.

  1. Am I correct in assuming that workerflow and workerflow-server are replacement for conductor?
  2. What is the value that these two are adding?

I am considering integrating in the future.

Thank you

2

Am I correct in assuming that workerflow and workerflow-server are replacement for conductor?

Yes, but in the 2.3 release both conductor and workflows are still there and workflows are only used for one particular feature. In the next release (2.4) conductor will be removed completely and all the functionality that conductor did will be taken over by the workflows.

What is the value that these two are adding?

Workflows are used when an operation is performed that requires updates in multiple micro services. e.g if you decommission a device this will require API calls to several microservices and these are done by the workflows service (previously conductor workflows).

This is not my area of expertise so I might not have gotten all the details correct here :smiley:, @tranchitella anything to add?

3

@mirzak your are right, workflows is used when a single operation requires multiple tasks to be performed across different microservices. The provisioning and decommissioning of devices are two good examples. The upcoming Mender release (2.4) does not require netflix conductor anymore and is using workflows for all orchestration needs. This also means Mender won’t require elasticsearch and redis anymore.

4

Thank you @mirzak and @tranchitella for the information, we being at mender v 2.0 how easy will it be to integrate workflow and abondon conductor?

5

@pei.cei you can upgrade from 2.0 to 2.4 (please note, it has not been released yet, ETA is beginning of June) and replace conductor with workflows. Latest released version of Mender (2.3) still requires conductor.

6

Thank you @tranchitella, we look forward to 2.4 release.

7

Please note that we normally only test one update path when doing releases, e.g for the upcoming release we will test that is smooth to update 2.3 -> 2.4. This is typically what we cover in our updating section and we make sure these instructions are valid for the case we test.

So if I was on 2.0, I would start updating to 2.1, .2.2 and 2.3 in the anticipation of 2.4 :slight_smile:

Other upgrade paths are of course possible but probably will not come without some additional friction.

8

Understood @mirzak