Strange Loop

2009 - 2023

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St. Louis, MO

Onyx: Distributed Workflows for Dynamic Systems

If you’ve ever jumped heads down into a codebase maintaining complex distributed activity and tried to simplify or change the processing workflow, not only will you scratch your head for 7 sleepless nights before you can get anywhere, but you’ll come to realize that workflows are often deeply complected with their mechanism of execution.

In this talk, we'll survey contemporary frameworks such as Storm and Cascading. We'll identify the pain points that seem to crop up time and time again: workflow specification, stateful lifecycle management, and developer testing - to name a few.

Onyx is a new distributed computation system written in Clojure that addresses these problems head-on. Hardware advancements in the last 10 years have enabled new designs that leverage fast networks and SSDs. Onyx takes advantage and adapts to this new environment. The concepts and tools discussed remove the incidental complexity that plagues modern frameworks.

Attendees will come away with new perspective on leveraging immutability, persistent data structures, queues, and transactions to tackle increasingly complex problem spaces.

Michael Drogalis

Michael Drogalis

Michael Drogalis is a software engineering consultant who mainly focuses on Clojure and Datomic.