Navigating the challenges of long-running processes is an important skill to survive modern architecture. The complexities arise from the growing distribution of systems and the need to address issues related to remote communication and the unavailability of peers. Additionally, designing effective domain boundaries often requires services to handle time-sensitive business problems, whether waiting for technical responses or human interactions. I will walk you through real-life examples of all those challenges and explain why this affects most software engineers today - in most of the services we build. Ignoring the problem is not a solution!

In this talk, I will look into how process orchestration can help. Tools like microservice orchestrators or workflow engines are built to implement long-running capabilities, and there is a new generation of tools that can work at infinite scale and solve high-throughput, low-latency scenarios. As a result, long-running capabilities are available to any project, enabling software engineers to make informed choices regarding domain boundaries and overarching architectural decisions.

You will see real-life examples and sample code (available on GitHub to play around with yourself) to help you decide and adopt long-running processes in your architecture.