Jepsen: Orkes Conductor 5.3.2

Jepsen is a well-known research project that stress-tests distributed systems for safety and liveness violations. This report focuses on Orkes Conductor, a workflow orchestration platform that runs user-defined tasks and routes data between them. The analysis covers versions 5.3.2 through 5.5.0-rc2 and documents the issues found during fault-injection testing.

The report identifies unexpectedly frequent concurrent execution of individual tasks, one issue that could significantly delay workflow execution, four minor startWorkflow errors or null ID problems, and three serious problems that caused Conductor to permanently abandon or forget workflow executions, or to mark them completed even though their tasks were never run. Orkes has since released version 5.5.6 with patches for all serious safety issues and fixes for two startWorkflow errors.

The analysis is aimed at engineers evaluating workflow orchestration platforms, distributed systems researchers, and anyone interested in the correctness of task orchestration under failures. It assumes familiarity with Jepsen’s testing approach and distributed systems concepts.

Readers should note that the research was funded by Orkes Inc. and conducted under the Jepsen ethics policy, and that Orkes has published a companion blog post. The delayed execution finding is described as consistent with Conductor’s design parameters and need not be addressed. Overall, the report is a detailed technical reference for understanding Conductor’s