Dear colleagues!
Finally, the Flow-based programming approach is scaled to the system level!
I’ve recently implemented the first MVP of the Kraken framework.
Kraken is a general framework for the orchestration of software systems.
It suggests the flow-based programming approach for organizing the interaction between the parts of the system (specific services). It means that every interaction with the system is presented as an “input event” - the data structure that contains all the necessary information about the interaction. The event then goes through a predefined chain of “components” (“pipelines”), the components call underlying services and modify the event. The final state of the event represents the result of the interaction.
Kraken provides a simple declarative JSON DSL for the pipeline definitions as well as for the definitions of the “clients” to underlying services.
When thinking about layered architecture (infrastructure, domain, application, and interface layer), Kraken is like Kubernetes for the application layer of the system. While K8s provides a declarative approach for defining the infrastructure layer (the one below the domain layer), Kraken does the same for the application layer of the system (orchestration layer).
In terms of the building blocks for the pipelines, Kraken has the same set of components as the ALF framework.
Kraken depends on ALF and under the hood the JSON-DSL definitions are being compiled into the ALF pipelines modules. Read the ALF Readme to understand how it works on the Elixir level.
In terms of “clients”, Kraken uses the Octopus library, which uses the simple “prepare-call-transform” approach for communication with external services. See the Octopus Readme for more details.
Check it here GitHub - antonmi/kraken: Flow-based System Orchestration Framework
Medium article - https://medium.com/better-programming/kraken-flow-based-service-orchestration-framework-5f2af5ee3d59
There is also the video of my talk at the Elixir Berlin meetup:
