Self-hosted · Open source · Workflow orchestration
Orchestration engine support and services
An open-source, self-hosted orchestration engine is a good runtime and a real operational commitment. It is free to run, maintained by its open-source community, and also available as a commercial, fully managed platform from its maintainer. If you self-host it, you get maintained code and no phone number. This page explains what that actually costs a team, and what we do about it.
What teams run into
The code is maintained. Your cluster is not. When a queue backs up at the weekend, the escalation path is whoever on your team knows the engine best.
Releases arrive every few weeks, and some carry security fixes for the libraries underneath. Falling behind means carrying known vulnerabilities; keeping up means spending engineering time on it every month.
Access control, a secrets path, single sign-on, audit logging and alerting are things the open-source build leaves to you. Teams usually discover this during a security review.
It is normally the persistence layer, the indexing strategy or how the workers poll.
The most common problem we see has nothing to do with the software.
What we do about it
Open source or managed?
We are not here to talk you out of buying the managed platform.
Teams that need multi-region failover, a contractual uptime guarantee or a fully managed cluster should buy the commercial platform, and we will implement it for you. Teams whose needs are met by the open-source build should keep their money and run it properly.
The Orchestration Health Check gives you that answer in ten business days, in writing, with the costs of both paths side by side.
Orchestration Engine and IBM
Most of our work joins the orchestration engine to IBM platforms, where it carries work across watsonx, MQ, webMethods and IBM Z. If that is your estate, start there.
See IBM solutionsStart here
Book an Orchestration Health Check.
A fixed-price review of your cluster: version currency, security, scaling headroom and what is missing. Ten business days, in writing.