Conductor OSS

Conductor is an open-source workflow orchestration engine originally developed at Netflix by the Swift team, designed to manage microservices-based business processes and distributed workflows at scale. Now maintained by Orkes (founded by the original Netflix engineering team including Viren Baraiya and Swift developers), the Conductor OSS community edition has over 32,000 stars as of 2026. Conductor uses a JSON-based Domain Specific Language (DSL) to define workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) composed of tasks, where each task represents a unit of work executed by either a remote microservice (SYSTEM or HTTP tasks) or custom worker processes (WORKER tasks). Built-in task types include: SIMPLE (worker tasks), HTTP, JSON JQ (data transformation), FORK (parallel execution), DO_WHILE, SWITCH (conditional branching), SUB_WORKFLOW, WAIT, EVENT (publish events to messaging systems), and INLINE (run JavaScript/Lambda code). Key features: durable execution with automatic retries and timeout handling, saga pattern support for compensating transactions, human tasks with user assignments, rate limiting, version control for workflow definitions, real-time execution monitoring via REST API and UI dashboard, and integration with external systems through webhooks and events. The engine persists workflow state in Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Dynomite, supporting millions of concurrent workflow executions. Conductor powers critical Netflix streaming workflows and is used by companies like Tesla, Mastercard, Adobe, and Goldman Sachs.