Recently moved some of the background jobs from graphile worker to DBOS. Really recommend for the simplicity. Took me half an hour.
I evaluated temporal, trigger, cloudflare workflows (highly not recommended), etc and this was the easiest to implement incrementally. Didn't need to change our infrastructure at all. Just plugged the worker where I had graphile worker.
The hosted service UX and frontend can use a lot of work though but it's not necessary for someone to use. OTEL support was there.
Why would you not recommend Cloudflare workflows? Was thinking of using them in my current project..
They inherit all the limitations of DO. For example, if you want to do anything that requires more than 6 TCP connection. Every fetch request will start failing silently because there is no more TCP connection to go through. This was a deal breaker for us. Their solution was split our code into more workflows or DOs.
You are limited to 128 MB ram which means everything has to be steamed. You will rewrite your code around this because many node libraries don't have streaming alternatives for things that spike memory usage.
The observability tab was buggy. Lifecycle chart is hard to understand for knowing when things will evict. Lot of small hidden limitations. Rate limits are very low for any mid scale application. Full Node compatibility is not there yet (work in progress) so needed to change some modules.
Overall, a gigantic waste of time unless you are doing something small scale. Just go with restate/upstash + lambdas/cloud run if you want simpler experience that scales in serverless manner
That is valuable, info dense comment. Thanks.
Agree on the UI - I wish it was improved
We heard you! Working on improvements based on user feedback. Stay tuned :)
What was the reason for the transition?
Needed checkpoints in some of our jobs wrapping around the AI agent so we can reduce cost and increase reliability (as workflow will start from mid step as opposed to a complete restart).
We already check pointed the agent but then figure it's better to have a generic abstraction for other stuff we do.
Interesting!
What made you opt for DBOS over Temporal?
Temporal required re-architecting some stuff, their typescript sdk and sandbox is bit unintuitive to use so would have been an additional item to grok for the team, and additional infrastructure to maintain. There was a latency trade off too which in our case mattered.
Didn't face any issue though. Temporal observability and UI was better than DBOS. Just harder to do incremental migration in an existing codebase.