couler VS hera

author seems to be describing the kind of patterns you might make with https://argoproj.github.io/argo-workflows/ . or see for example https://github.com/couler-proj/couler , which is an sdk for describing tasks that may be submitted to different workflow engines on the backend.

it's a little confusing to me that the author seems to object to "pipelines" and then equate them with messaging-queues. for me at least, "pipeline" vs "workflow-engine" vs "scheduler" are all basically synonyms in this context. those things may or may not be implemented with a message-queue for persistence, but the persistence layer itself is usually below the level of abstraction that $current_problem is really concerned with. like the author says, eventually you have to track state/timestamps/logs, but you get that from the beginning if you start with a workflow engine.

i agree with author that message-queues should not be a knee-jerk response to most problems because the LoE for edge-cases/observability/monitoring is huge. (maybe reach for a queue only if you may actually overwhelm whatever the "scheduler" can handle.) but don't build the scheduler from scratch either.. use argowf, kubeflow, or a more opinionated framework like airflow, mlflow, databricks, aws lamda or step-functions. all/any of these should have config or api that's robust enough to express rate-limit/retry stuff. almost any of these choices has better observability out-of-the-box than you can easily get from a queue. but most importantly.. they provide idioms for handling failure that data-science folks and junior devs can work with. the right way to structure code is just much more clear and things like structuring messages/events, subclassing workers, repeating/retrying tasks, is just harder to mess up.

Argo Labs now features Hera Workflows! Hera is a very simple Python library for constructing workflows - it can run any Python script you submit, allowing you and your company to focus on the value of the script itself rather than workflow construction :) you can run anything! ML workflows, DevOps jobs, crons with API calls, ETLs using pure Python, containers with commands, easily integrate with things like Horovod, etc.