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Funny to see this continue to get so much energy. I was strongly opposed to making some AWS Step Function workflows fully immutable in the first project I used

by taeric 3y ago

Funny to see this continue to get so much energy. I was strongly opposed to making some AWS Step Function workflows fully immutable in the first project I used it for. This was all the more my feeling with some of the gigantic state machines that teams around me were building. Not shockingly, situations would arise where we could know ahead of time that a large portion of outstanding state machines were cruising to a crash at step $BIG_NUMBER. Ironically, I'm still largely about idempotent calls that should be able to trigger something. And those idempotent identifiers can be stored such that you can replay or serve up the relevant data, as needed. But going all in and forcing a long compute chain that cannot be changed is something you do in places you have to do it. No reason to choose to do it everywhere. And certainly don't build larger and larger compute chains between durable writes to the backing data store.

k8svet 3y ago
That... Just sounds like a horrible implementation/engine/execution/strategy whatever you want to call it. I don't see any reason whatsoever that a temporal workflow composed of activities would be subject to the things you've described. And I don't even think it's that impressive of an implementation of the idea.
- taeric 3y ago
  And that sounds like a no true scotsman criticism. :D My complaint was less that it isn't a compelling idea. The problem seems to be that people want to expand the one system they are working on to be a fully comprehensive system. I remember one team tried to get their entire state reflected in a Step Function state machine that could run for as long as necessary. Idea literally being a state machine that would last years or so. They compromised for one that would only last a week or so. And then faced the consequences rather quickly. And note, given enough time, I think this can work. On a deadline, though, I've seen it fail too many times for it to be my goto solution. All the time by people that are objectively smarter than I am.
  - k8svet 3y ago
    > And that sounds like a no true scotsman criticism. :D Very fair, and point totally understood.

by taeric 3y ago

k8svet 3y ago

That... Just sounds like a horrible implementation/engine/execution/strategy whatever you want to call it. I don't see any reason whatsoever that a temporal workflow composed of activities would be subject to the things you've described. And I don't even think it's that impressive of an implementation of the idea.

taeric 3y ago
And that sounds like a no true scotsman criticism. :D My complaint was less that it isn't a compelling idea. The problem seems to be that people want to expand the one system they are working on to be a fully comprehensive system. I remember one team tried to get their entire state reflected in a Step Function state machine that could run for as long as necessary. Idea literally being a state machine that would last years or so. They compromised for one that would only last a week or so. And then faced the consequences rather quickly. And note, given enough time, I think this can work. On a deadline, though, I've seen it fail too many times for it to be my goto solution. All the time by people that are objectively smarter than I am.
- k8svet 3y ago
  > And that sounds like a no true scotsman criticism. :D Very fair, and point totally understood.