Rebuilding Workflow Orchestration in Elixir: The Story of Gust

Speaker:
Marcio Klepacz


Abstract:

A case study on building Gust, a durable workflow orchestration system in Elixir, after getting frustrated with Python/Airflow. I’ll break down what “orchestration” really means, what Airflow does well (and where it gets heavy), then walk through Gust’s core pieces: task, scheduling, retries, logs/observability, and secrets. Finally, I’ll show how OTP supervision and lightweight processes enabled a simpler, more reliable engine with major efficiency and performance gains.

Key Takeaways:

  • Know what an orchestration system is, what problems it solves, what Airflow and Gust are, and how they differ from a background job library.

Target Audience:

  • Platform / ML engineers, as well as tech managers.

Level: Introductory and overview

Tags: gust, orchestration, dags