For context (because he's too good to brag) OP is among the original creators of Apache Flink.

Question for OP: I'd bet Flink's Statefuns comes in Restate's story. Could you please comment on this? Maybe Statefuns we're sort of a plugin, and you guys wanted to rebase to the core of a distributed function?

A few links worth sharing here:

- Blog post with an overview of Restate 1.0: https://restate.dev/blog/announcing-restate-1.0-restate-clou...

- Restate docs: https://docs.restate.dev/

- Discord, for anyone who wants to chat interactively: https://discord.com/invite/skW3AZ6uGd

how do tools like this handle evolving workflows? e.g., if I have a "durable worklflow" that sleeps for a month and then performs its next actions, what do I do if I need to change the workflow during that month? I really like the concept but this seems like an issue for anything except fairly short workflows. If I keep my data and algorithms separate I can modify my event handling code while workflows are "active."

Looks very interesting, but calling it Open Source is misleading. BSL is not "minimal Amazon defense". It effectively prevents any meaningful dynamic functionality to be built on top of it without a commercial subscription.

I'm not sure "In Rust" serve any marketing value. A product's success rarely has to do with the use of a programming language, if not at all. I understand the arguments made by Paul Graham on the effectiveness of programming languages, but specifically for a workflow manager, a user like me cares literally zero about which programming language the workflow system uses even if I have to hack into the internal of the system, and latency really matters a lot less than throughput.

Could you share details on limits to be mindful of when designing workflows? Some things I'd love to be able to reference at a glance:

1. Max execution duration of a workflow

2. Max input/output payload size in bytes for a service invocation

3. Max timeout for a service invocation

4. Max number of allowed state transitions in a workflow

5. Max Journal history retention time

I still haven't gotten around to adopting Restate yet, but it's on the radar. One thing that Step Functions probably has over Restate is the diagram visualization of your state machine definition and execution history. It's been really neat to be able to zero in on a root cause at the conceptual level instead of the implementation level.

One big hangup for me is that there's only a single node orchestrator as a CDK construct. Having a HA setup would be a must for business critical flows.

I stumbled on Restate a few months ago and left the following message on their discord.

> I was considering writing a framework that would let you author AWS Step Functions workflows as code in a typesafe way when I stumbled on Restate. This looks really interesting and the blog posts show that the team really understands the problem space.

> My own background in this domain was as an early user of AWS SWF internally at AWS many, many years ago. We were incredibly frustrated by the AWS Flow framework built on top of SWF, so I ended up creating a meta Java framework that let you express workflows as code with true type-safety, arrow function based step delegations, and leveraging Either/Maybe/Promise and other monads for expressiveness. The DX was leaps and bounds better than anything else out at the time. This was back around 2015, I think.

> Fast-forward to today, I'm now running a startup that uses AWS Step Functions. It has some benefits, the most notable being that it's fully serverless. However, the lack of type-safety is incredibly frustrating. An innocent looking change can easily result in States.Runtime errors that cannot be caught and ignore all your catch-error logic. Then, of course, is how ridiculous it feels to write logic in JSON or a JSON-builder using CDK. As if that wasn't bad enough, the pricing is also quite steep. $25 for every million state transitions feels like a lot when you need to create so many extra state transitions for common patterns like sagas, choice branches, etc.

> I'm looking forward to seeing how Restate matures!

Looks really awesome. Always been looking for some easy to use async workflows + cronjobs service to use with serverless like Vercel.

Also something about this area always makes me excited. I guess it must be the thought of having all these tasks just working in the background without having to explicitly manage them.

One question I have is does anyone have experience for building data pipelines in this type of architecture?

Does it make sense to fan out on lots of small tasks? Or is it better to batch things into bigger tasks to reduce the overhead.

Feedback: everybody’s question is going to be on why this over temporal? I’ve noticed you answered a little bit of that below. My advice would be to write a detailed blog post maybe on how both the systems compare from installation to use cases and administration, etc - I’ve been following your blog and while I think y’all are doing interesting stuff I still haven’t wrapped my head around how exactly is restate different from temporal which is a lot more funded, has almost every unicorn using them and are fully permissively licensed.

Hi. I'm excited to try this out. Does the typescript library for writing restate services run in Deno? And how about in a Cloudflare worker? These aren't quite nodejs environments but they do both offer comparability layers that make most nodejs libraries work. Just wondering if you know if the SDK will run in those runtimes? Thanks

Is this a competitor to Temporal? I admit that I have never used either, but it strikes me as odd that these things bring their own data layer. Is the workload not possible using a general purpose [R]DBMS?

I have been following on this project on a while and i tried it on older version and was already amazing. I am so excited to try this version out! specially with the cloud offering

How does Restate compare with Apache Airflow or Prefect?

Nice! Excited tools that makes using microservices easier.

Question tho, when will you guys have python support? I’m a ml researcher here and can you tell that most of my work is now pipelines between different services, e.g. Chaining multiple LLM services. Big bottleneck is if one service returns an error and crashes the full chain.

Big fan of this work nevertheless. Just think you have alpha on the table

Hey all, I work with @sewen, and I focus on the cloud platform which also launched today (https://restate.dev/blog/announcing-restate-cloud-early-acce...) Happy to answer any questions :)

Any plans for a Python SDK? We’re actively looking for a platform like this but our stack is TS / Python!

There’s a lot of jargon in this, is there a lay person explanation of what problem this solves?

Do you have anything comparing and contrasting with temporal?

I'm particularly interested in the scaling characteristics, and how your approach to durable storage (seems no external database is required?) differs

I understand the need for writing this as an SDK over existing languages for adoption reasons, but in your opinion would a programming language purposely built for such a paradigm make more sense?

The cloud setup was super fast! I used it for an existing app + restate TS sdk, really took a few steps to get things up and running! Looking forward to more support for nextjs/node

Handling durability for RPCs is a neat idea. Can you do chained rollbacks? ie an rpc down the call stack fails to revert the whole stack instead of retrying?

"Virtual Objects" is a cool concept, the name might not reflect the power it brings though. Luckily, the documentation seems to explain it well.

This seems interesting!

I couldn’t find an equivalent of the codec server in temporal that basically encrypts all data in the event log. Is there something similar?

Being fairly familiar with Temporal, I definitely appreciate your cleaner architectural choices. Add a Go SDK and I’ll definitely give this a try.

Looks cool. Just out of curiosity, where did you find the template for your homepage? is there a content framework you are using ?

techcrunch announcement here as well https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/12/restate-raises-7m-for-its-...

Are there any theoretical underpinnings in the design of restate? Any papers/references. Thanks!

Looks awesome! Have you ever considered EPL for an Amazon defense?

The label "Sign in with your corporate ID" for GitHub sign in seems a little odd..

Cool, congrats on launching! Could this replace Jobrunr?