The Instaclustr Managed Platform now provides an HTTP API to allow interaction with Cadence® workflows from virtually any language. Originally developed and open sourced by Uber, Cadence is a workflow engine that greatly simplifies microservices orchestration for executing complex business processes at scale.  

Until now, fully supported client libraries were only available for Java and Go. This meant that organizations standardized on different languages would have to create shims in the supported languages if they wished to interface with Cadence.

Instaclustr’s experience with Apache Kafka® led us to believe that a similar approach taken with Kafka REST proxies could be useful to make it simple to interact with Cadence from additional languages. As we have a full-time open source contributor to Cadence on staff, we were able to review options and determine that the Cadence server itself could be modified to support an HTTP API for key functions. We then worked to develop and contribute to the Cadence open source project functionality that allows the following actions to be easily carried out via HTTPS and JSON: 

• Initiate workflows 
• Signal workflows 
• Terminate workflows 
• Get cluster information 

This functionality was originally released in Cadence 1.2. Now, the Instaclustr Platform supports provisioning of Cadence 1.2 including the required configuration for the HTTP API functionality. Management of firewall rules and security groups for the HTTP API can be carried out independently of the gRPC API. 

“We believe that Cadence has a strong future as a leading workflow technology and are pleased to be able to make a continued contribution to the open source project, including this new HTTP API functionality, and to bring the new features of Cadence to our platform” said Ben Slater, Chief Product Officer, Instaclustr. 

For further information or a technical briefing, contact an Instaclustr Customer Success representative or [email protected].