Netflix has announced that it is discontinuing its support for Conductor, a popular orchestration engine for microservices that the streaming giant open-sourced in 2016. This decision marks a significant shift in the company’s open-source strategy and has implications for the wider Conductor community.
Key Takeaway
Netflix discontinues support for Conductor, prompting Orkes to take ownership with a new fork, signaling a shift in the project’s development and roadmap.
Netflix’s Strategic Decision
In a statement, Netflix expressed the difficulty of the decision to discontinue support for Conductor. The company emphasized the need to realign its resources to better serve its business objectives with an internal Conductor fork. While Netflix will no longer maintain the Conductor repository, it acknowledged the active promotion of alternative forks by members of the Conductor community and expressed gratitude for their support and contributions over the years.
Orkes Takes Ownership
Amid Netflix’s decision, Orkes, a startup founded by the original engineers behind the Conductor project, has announced its plans to take ownership of the project with a new fork. The team aims to maintain a close relationship with the broader Conductor community and work in partnership to ensure the continued success of the project. Orkes sees this as not just a continuation of an existing project, but also an acceleration of innovation with the community’s interests at its core.
Community-Centric Approach
Orkes has emphasized a very positive outlook on this transition, stating that the roadmap for Conductor will be informed by the open-source community. The company aims to ensure that Conductor continues to thrive and evolve with the collective vision of the community. Notably, Orkes has recently launched its AI Orchestration platform, which simplifies the integration of language models and machine learning inferencing into workflows. Additionally, the company introduced Human Task, facilitating the combination of AI-based decision-making with human oversight in business processes.
