Show HN: Stepped Actions – distributed workflow orchestration for Rails

Summary

Stepped Actions Stepped is a Rails engine for orchestrating complex workflows as a tree of actions. Each action is persisted, runs through Active Job, and can fan out into more actions while keeping the parent action moving step-by-step as dependencies complete. Stepped was extracted out of Envirobly where it powers tasks like application deployment, that involve complex, out-of-the-band tasks like DNS provisioning, retries, waiting for instances to boot, running health checks and all the fun of a highly distributed networked system. Concepts Action trees : define a root action with multiple steps; each step can enqueue more actions and the step completes only once all the actions within it complete. : define a root action with multiple steps; each step can enqueue more actions and the step completes only once all the actions within it complete. Models are the Actors : in Rails, your business logic usually centers around database-persisted models. Stepped takes advantage of this and allows you to define and run actions on all your models, out of the box. : in Rails, your business logic usually centers around database-persisted models. Stepped takes advantage of this and allows you to define and run actions on all your models, out of the box. Concurrency lanes : actions with the same concurrency_key share a Stepped::Performance , so only one runs at a time while others queue up (with automatic superseding of older queued work). : actions with the same share a , so only one runs at a time while others queue up (with automatic superseding of older queued work). Reuse : optional checksum lets Stepped skip work that is already achieved, or share a currently-performing action with multiple parents. Imagine you need to launch multiple workflows with different outcomes, that all depend on the outcome of the same action, somewhere in the action tree. Stepped makes this easy and efficient. : optional lets Stepped skip work that is already achieved, or share a currently-perfor...