Duty – TypeScript Workflow Orchestration (opens in new tab)

Hey HN,

I've been working on Duty, a lightweight workflow orchestration tool for Node.JS/TypeScript. The goal is to provide durable, scalable, and Postgres-backed task orchestration.

Think of it like Temporal that only requires a Postgres database & and an npm install.

Think of it like a message queue but orchestrated with state persistence, automatic retries, and progress caching.

It's not ready for release just yet but I'd appreciate it if you read the README and starred the repository if this interests you at all.

I'd really like your feedback on this!

Thanks

I'm interested in this project and have starred it.

Some thoughts:

- Amazon Step Functions make it very easy for me to visualise a flow through an execution in the AWS console. What visualisation could you offer?

- If I try and DIY my workflow orchestration with something like DynamoDB and XState, I have a lot of infra to worry about, but I do get a very flexible workflow definition by using a full state machine. Is it fair to say Duty doesn't yet support complex workflow graphs?

- Using JavaScript immediately makes me think serverless. But this project relies on Postgres which isn't ideal for serverless flows. Could it also support serverless databases and scheduling?