Onyx - Distributed Workflows for Dynamic Systems

Explore a conference talk on Onyx, a distributed computation system written in Clojure, that addresses common pain points in complex distributed activity processing. Dive into the challenges of workflow specification, stateful lifecycle management, and developer testing in contemporary frameworks like Storm and Cascading. Learn how Onyx leverages immutability, persistent data structures, queues, and transactions to simplify and change processing workflows. Discover how this innovative system adapts to modern hardware advancements, utilizing fast networks and SSDs to remove incidental complexity. Gain new perspectives on tackling increasingly complex problem spaces through concepts such as data representation, functions, transducers, positional representation, execution context, extensibility model, runtime discovery, and task state API. Understand the architecture overview and performance considerations of Onyx, presented by software engineering consultant Michael Drogalis at the Strange Loop Conference.