Programming Throwdown educates Computer Scientists and Software Engineers on a cavalcade of programming and tech topics. Every show will cover a new programming language, so listeners will be able to speak intelligently about any programming language.

185: Workflow Orchestrators

November 04, 2025 1:32:02 88.39 MB Downloads: 0

Intro topic: Asymmetric Returns


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Topic: Workflow Orchestrators

  • Why
    • Batch jobs (embarrassingly parallel)
    • Long-running tasks (e.g. transcoding video)
    • Checkpointing/resuming
  • How
    • Message Queues
    • Containerization
    • Worker Pools & Autoscaling
    • History & Backfill
  • Steps to run workflows:
    • Containerize the workflow definition and send to the cloud
    • Containerize all the individual tasks
    • Submit job(s)
  • Examples
    • Airflow
      • Legacy but dominant
    • Dagster
      • Great UX for python developers
    • Temporal: https://temporal.io/
      • The new hotness
    • Ray
      • Low-level but very powerful
    • Kubeflow
      • Designed for ML workflows, integrated dashboard

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