Temporal<\/a>, for example, offers a somewhat similar feature set, though the Restate team would likely argue that its system is faster and more lightweight.<\/p>\nEwen said after thirteen years with Flink, it was time to tackle a new problem.. \u201cWhile we were working on Flink, we had this set of use cases that kept coming up, where folks were kind of abusing Flink for transactional orchestration style-use cases,\u201d he told me. \u201cAnd it was not great when they used it for that, but they told us they didn\u2019t find anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n
After seeing users do this again and again, the team decided that if they were going to build another company, they\u2019d look into how they could solve this problem more elegantly.<\/p>\n
Virtually every modern application today consists of chains of workflows that are handled by a distributed set of services that have to reliably talk to each other. It takes a very experienced team to build a fault-tolerant distributed system like that \u2014 and many companies build their own \u2014 but it\u2019s also table stakes and not something that\u2019s necessarily going to help those companies differentiate their product.<\/p>\nImage Credits:<\/strong> Restate<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nLooking at this, Ewen told me, the team took some of the stream-based processing ideas from Flink and then combined that with the workflows-as-code concept and a specialized event log \u2014 because at the core of every workflow engine is a log. \u201cRestate takes the workflow-as-code idea and adds a few other somewhat stream-processing-inspired ideas. We evolved it into a more general-purpose distributed programming model based on durable execution, virtual objects and durable promises \u2014 and put it on an event-driven foundation,\u201d Ewen said.<\/p>\n
The engine that powers that is very small and lightweight and, Ewen stressed, fast \u2014 in part because it ships as a single binary. He believes this will make the service usable in situations where you\u2019d not classically use a workflow engine \u2014 think e-commerce shopping carts, for example. A lightweight workflow engine, with its built-in guarantees, durable execution and retries if things go wrong, ensures that items in an abandoned shopping cart are released back to other customers after a set time, for example, minimizing the risk of something failing in the process.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Restate] does the classical workflows code things, just on an extremely lightweight foundation \u2014 and it goes a little further than just standard workflow use cases. It incorporates communication and state management as a core concept, so you can really use it to also build things that are not good cases for workflows but still fit very well if you want to build a proper microservice architecture,\u201d Ewen explained.<\/p>\n
The company also today launched its hosted Restate Cloud into early access. For now, it\u2019s available for free and Ewen was quite open about the fact that the team is still trying to figure out how people will use it before deciding on how to monetize the service.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s funding round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Essence VC, firstminute.capital and angels like Datadog founder Oli Pomel and Apache Kafka and Confluent founders Jay Kreps and Neha Narkhede. The company will use the funding to hire and build out its infrastructure, as well as to bring its SDK to more languages (it currently supports TypeScript, Java and Kotlin). <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s still challenging to make distributed transactional applications correct, resilient, and scalable,\u201d said Kreps. \u201cRestate\u2019s approach of marrying durable execution and event-driven architectures is a big step towards fixing that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When one of the co-creators of the popular open-source stream-processing framework Apache Flink launches a new startup, it\u2019s worth paying attention. Stephan Ewen was among the founding team of the open source project back in 2010 and then later became the CTO of Data Artisans, which aimed to monetize Flink. Alibaba then acquired the company […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":104122,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-104121","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}