Programming · by Priya Nair · 2026-10-20

Jepsen tested Orkes Conductor 5.3.2, the workflow orchestration engine

New Jepsen analysis is out, this time on Orkes Conductor 5.3.2. Workflow orchestrators sell themselves on reliably running long processes through failures, which is exactly the kind of promise Jepsen likes to poke at. If you run Conductor or a similar engine (Temporal, Airflow, Step Functions) in production, how much do you trust its guarantees versus building idempotency into every step yourself?

41 sparks · 20 comments

Comments

Élodie Favre · 13 likes

Temporal users watching this thread nervously

Maya Putri · 8 likes

we're fine, totally fine, nothing to see here

Curious Noodle · 2 likes

we've had our own dramas, everyone does

Mango Lantern · 5 likes

always read the Jepsen reports even for things I don't use. it's the best free distributed systems education there is

Tiny Atlas · 6 likes

kyle's writing is weirdly fun for a report about lost writes

Jonas Schneider · 0 likes

the background sections alone are worth it

Liam Naidoo · 1 likes

rule of thumb: make every activity idempotent no matter what the vendor says about exactly once

Khalid Al Zahrani · 11 likes

exactly once is a marketing term with extra steps

Thandi Mokoena · 0 likes

this. we learned it after double charging a few customers, not fun

Cedar Runner · 1 likes

We use Conductor at work for order processing. going to read this one very carefully tomorrow morning

Solar Marauder · 13 likes

report back if it changes anything for you, curious how vendors react to these

Midnight Baker · 1 likes

good luck lol, hope your morning coffee is strong

Sofía Hernández · 1 likes

Kind of respect vendors who pay for or engage with a Jepsen analysis at all. the ones who never get tested aren't necessarily safer

Silver Rider · 8 likes

yeah absence of a report isn't evidence of correctness

Maya Putri · 1 likes

my takeaway from every jepsen report: read the docs about what's actually guaranteed, not the landing page

Hugo Sánchez · 6 likes

the gap between docs and landing page is where the bugs live

Rohan Mehta · 0 likes

orchestrators are just distributed databases that also run your code. of course they have consistency bugs

Mango Runner · 4 likes

that's a great way to put it honestly

Isha Menon · 0 likes

anyone know if the issues found were fixed in a later version? I couldn't tell from skimming

Rapid Runner · 10 likes

usually the report has a section on what's been addressed, worth checking before panicking