Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers SE Radio 681: Qian Li on DBOS Durable Execution/Serverless Computing Platform
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Aug 12, 2025 Qian Li, co-founder and chief architect at DBOS, dives into the creation of a durable execution platform rooted in groundbreaking research from Postgres and Spark. She discusses how DBOS enables resilient workflows by persisting program execution states, which is crucial for reliable applications. Li highlights the integration of AI, showcasing its real-world uses, and explains unique features like SQL-accessible state tables and a time-travel debugger. The conversation also compares DBOS to existing workflow technologies, revealing its advantages in reliability and observability.
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Persist Execution State In The Database
- DBOS persists program execution state in Postgres, not just application data.
- This lets workflows resume from the last completed step after crashes for exact recovery.
Annotate Workflows To Get Checkpointing
- Wrap workflow functions with DBOS annotations to checkpoint inputs and outputs automatically.
- Rely on recorded outputs to skip re-execution and guarantee effectively exactly-once semantics.
Idempotency Keys For External Safety
- DBOS auto-generates idempotency keys per workflow and step to interact safely with external systems.
- Idempotency lets retries avoid duplicate side effects when external services are unreliable.