flowservice

Flowservice is a software pattern and, in some contexts, a product category for managing the execution and governance of flows in distributed applications. It provides an abstraction that coordinates data and control across producers, processors, and consumers, enabling dynamic routing, transformation, and stateful processing of sequences of tasks.

Key concepts include flow definitions (the steps, conditions, and data formats), a flow engine or orchestrator (executes the pipeline), connectors (adapters to external systems), and observability tooling (metrics, logs, tracing). Flows may be batch or streaming and may support transformations, filtering, routing decisions, and error handling. State management, idempotency, retries, backpressure, and versioning are central concerns.

Architecturally, a flowservice typically includes a repository for flow definitions, an execution engine, input/output connectors or topics, and an event bus or messaging layer, plus security and governance components. It aims to decouple producers and consumers, improve visibility, and provide centralized control over end-to-end processing.

Common use cases include data integration and ETL, microservice orchestration or choreography, real-time analytics pipelines, IoT data processing, and automated business processes. Compared with traditional BPM/workflow engines, flowservices emphasize distributed execution across services and data systems, while remaining agnostic to the underlying transport. Compared with simple message brokers, they focus on end-to-end flow management rather than routing messages in isolation.

The term is used variably and may denote a generic pattern or vendor-specific product. See also workflow engine, data pipeline, event-driven architecture, orchestration and choreography.