Article: Implementing Durable Workflows on Postgres Without an External Orchestrator

8.3 relevance

Durable workflows on Postgres without external orchestrator, directly applicable to platform engineering.

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Why It Matters

For a platform engineer or architect, this pattern collapses reliability and security to one dependency—your existing Postgres—removing a stateful orchestrator from the critical path while keeping full relational query capability for debugging and observability.

Key Takeaways

Evaluate replacing Temporal or Step Functions with Postgres-native durable execution using SKIP LOCKED for queues and primary-key checkpoints for idempotency to reduce operational complexity.

Article: Implementing Durable Workflows on Postgres Without an External Orchestrator

Summary

Durable workflows can be implemented on Postgres without an external orchestrator by using SELECT ... FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED for concurrent work queues, primary-key constraints on step checkpoints for idempotency, and a lease-and-sweeper pattern for crash recovery. This approach eliminates Temporal or AWS Step Functions as a single point of failure, reduces operational overhead, and makes observability a plain SQL query since workflow state lives in the primary database. The article details how Kestrel Workflows built this pattern to handle incident response automation on Kubernetes where workflow executions must survive process rescheduling.

Author

Raman Varma