Orkes forks Conductor as Netflix abandons the open source project | TechCrunch

Netflix today announced that it is discontinuing its support for Conductor, a popular orchestration engine for microservices the streaming giant open sourced in 2016. With more than 13,000 GitHub stars and thousands of companies that use it as an essential part of their infrastructure, Conductor is one of the company’s most popular open source projects, but the company has now decided to put its efforts elsewhere.

Image Credits: Netflix/Conductor

“This strategic decision, while difficult, is essential for realigning our resources to better serve our business objectives with our internal Conductor fork,” the company wrote in a statement. “We are deeply grateful for your support and contributions over the years. While Netflix will no longer be maintaining this repo, members of the Conductor community have been active in promoting alternative forks of this project, so we trust that the health of the community will remain strong moving forward.”

One of those companies is Orkes, a startup founded by the engineers who originally created the Conductor project while they were at Netflix. Orkes plans to take ownership of the project with a new fork.

The team plans to maintain in close relationship with the rest of the Conductor community. “We are excited to work in partnership with the broader community to ensure that Conductor continues to thrive and this new chapter for Conductor OSS reflects the collective vision of this thriving community,” Orkes writes in its announcement. “This isn’t just a continuation of an existing project; it’s also an acceleration of innovation with the community’s interests at its core.”

Indeed, the company is putting a very positive spin on this news and also notes that “the roadmap for Conductor will now be firmly informed by those who use and love it: the open source community.”

Most recently, Orkes launched its AI Orchestration platform. This makes it easier for developers to add language models and machine learning inferencing to their workflows by leveraging Orkes’ pre-built integrations with services like Azure Open AI, OpenAI and Google’s Vertex AI. In concert with AI Orchestration, the company also launched Human Task, which brings a human element to AI workflows by making it easier to combine AI-based decision-making with human oversight at critical junctures in a business process.