Drift Platform - Architecture Overview

Table of Contents

  1. System Architecture
  2. Technology Stack
  3. Core Components
  4. Deployment View

System Architecture

High-Level Architecture Diagram

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Workflow Studio (WiP) — A low-code UI to design, configure, and manage workflows. Provides a drag-and-drop interface to create DAG using native nodes (HTTP calls, branching, parallel execution, wait, i/o, etc.)

Client Gateway — API layer for client integration. Allows external systems to trigger and interact with workflows.

Temporal Server — Backbone of Drift, providing durable execution, retries, and scheduling for workflows. Ensures fault tolerance and allows workflows to resume from failure points automatically by replaying event history.

Worker Engine — Implements native node functionalities. Executes the DAG. Written using Temporal’s Java SDK.

DSL Store — API layer for workflow and node definition CRUD. Acts as the backend for Workflow Studio. Supports versioning and rollback.

Monitoring & Debugging Tools — Observability tools that provide real-time monitoring, debugging, and logging for running workflows. Includes Temporal’s UI, SDK, and server dashboards powered by SDK metrics.


Tech Stack Used

Temporal — Self-hosted Temporal for workflow orchestration designed to execute asynchronous long-running business logic. Distributed, durable, horizontally scalable, and highly available.

TiDB — Persistence store for Temporal to store workflow state, history, and task queues. Horizontally scalable with high availability. Temporal provides other persistence options as well.

Redis — Pub/sub to support sync API interaction for clients. Sentinel-based for high availability. Also used for caching workflow and node specs.

ElasticSearch — Visibility store for Temporal.

HBase — Workflow context, workflow and node spec storage; more connectors to follow.


Next: High-Level Design (HLD)

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