Pstage

Pstage is a software framework designed to create, manage, and execute modular processing pipelines. In Pstage, a pipeline is composed of stages, reusable processing units that transform input data into output data. The framework emphasizes modularity, reusability, and observability, and supports both batch and streaming workflows.

Originating in the early 2020s, the Pstage project began as an open-source initiative led by a community of data engineers and developers who sought a unified way to build scalable pipelines. The name reflects its focus on pipeline stages as building blocks and its broader aim of enabling composable data processing workflows.

Architecture and runtime: Pstage uses a directed graph model to connect stages, enabling flexible data flow designs. Each stage can be implemented in multiple languages and run in isolation via containers. The runtime provides scheduling, parallelism, error isolation, and checkpointing. It includes connectors to common data formats and services such as CSV, JSON, Parquet, databases, message queues, and cloud storage. The system supports both synchronous and asynchronous execution and offers a declarative approach to pipeline specification.

Features: The framework supports declarative pipeline definitions, versioned stage templates, and a mix of stateful and stateless processing. It provides built-in monitoring, metrics, and logging, along with configurable retry policies and fault-tolerant execution. I/O and processing will typically be pluggable through a registry of connectors and plugins, enabling integration with container runtimes and orchestration platforms.

Use cases: Pstage is used for data engineering ETL pipelines, media processing workflows such as transcoding and tagging, scientific and research workflows, and machine learning preprocessing pipelines.

Governance and ecosystem: The project is community-driven, with a plugin registry and ongoing contributions. Documentation emphasizes portability, testability, and reproducibility across environments.