DBOS-Cloud: Simple and Robust Workflow Orchestration

Vince FulcoVince Fulco
3 min read

Table of contents

This is a toy DBOS app example focusing on remote deployment to DBOS Cloud, their hosted solution with a generous free tier for devs.

The github repo sets up two simple HTTP API endpoints that: 1) sends an email using Postmark ESP when you hit /sendemail/:friend/:content endpoint and 2) inserts a record into a postgres d'base instance and retrieves the records when you visit the /emails endpoint.

Prerequisites

  1. Make sure you have node.js 21.x

  2. Sign up for DBOS Cloud (https://www.dbos.dev/dbos-cloud)

  3. Have a Postmark account, username / password from the server (https://postmarkapp.com/), and a specific sending email address setup

***Since this uses nodemailer, you can easily swap out Postmark for your email service provider of choice.

Getting Started

  1. Clone this repository and navigate to the project directory

  2. Install the dependencies

Be sure not to commit / hard code your secrets to a public repo! This setup is meant for local development and direct deployment to the dbos-cloud service.

  1. To deploy to DBOS-cloud, login with this, "npx dbos-cloud login" and follow the instructions to match the uuid given in the console to the one in the browser, then standard login user/password applies.

  2. Next provision a d'base instance: "npx dbos-cloud db provision database-instance-name -U database-username"

  3. Register your app with the d'base instance: "npx dbos-cloud app register -d database-instance-name"

  4. To use secrets in DBOS, add your variables in the cli like this:

These will be picked up at build time and inserted into the dbos-config.yaml fields: ${PGPASSWORD}, ${POSTMARK_USER}, ${POSTMARK_PASSWORD}, ${SENDER_EMAIL}, ${RECIPIENT_EMAIL} respectively.

  1. And finally deploy your app: "npx dbos-cloud app deploy"

After a minute or two, you'll get back an api endpoint that looks like: https://<username>-<app-name>.cloud.dbos.dev/.

  1. Test the endpoint

First, visit https://<username>-<app-name>.cloud.dbos.dev/sendemail/friend/content replacing 'friend' and 'content' with your own choices. Hitting this sends an email using Postmark and inserts a record into the d'base named 'postmark'.

Then visit https://<username>-<app-name>.cloud.dbos.dev/emails to retrieve the records from the d'base.

  1. To delete the app online,npx dbos-cloud app delete [application-name] --dropdb. Remove the '--dropdb' parameter if you want to retain the database table.

Some caveats:

  • The endpoint is not secure, and anyone can send an email if they guess the assigned endpoint. You should add some sort of authentication to the endpoint to prevent abuse.

Here are some instructions for that: https://docs.dbos.dev/tutorials/authentication-authorization

  • When building workflows with DBOS, consider creating the respective standalone functions, then wrapping them in an Httpapi decorator / function, then wrap all that in a @workflow which will add a bunch of cool built-in features.

-- granular observability -- guaranteed only once execution -- asynchronous execution -- precise management and observability of workflows

There are so many more benefits to mention re: debugging, monitoring and overall speed, security, and costs which can be explored further here: https://docs.dbos.dev/

Reference Docs (From Official Repo)

This post was originally created on [dev.to](https://dev.to/vince_hirefunnel_co/dbos-cloud-simple-and-robust-workflow-orchestration-cn4).

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Vince Fulco
Vince Fulco