Mistral Workflow Service

What is Mistral?

Mistral is a workflow service. Lots of computations in computer systems nowadays can be represented as processes that consist of multiple interconnected steps that need to run in a particular order. Those steps are often interactions with components distributed across different machines: real hardware machines, cloud virtual machines or containers. Mistral provides capabilities to automate such processes.

Particularly, Mistral can be used, for example, for solving administrator tasks related to managing clusters of software, or for any other tasks that span multiple components and take long to complete. It can also be used as a central component for deploying distributed software in a truly large scale. In any case where the ability to track the progress of the activity becomes crucial, Mistral is a good fit.

A Mistral user can describe such a process as a set of tasks and transitions between them, and upload such a definition to Mistral, which will take care of state management, correct execution order, parallelism, synchronization and high availability. In Mistral terminology such a set of tasks and relations between them is called a workflow.

Just to Get Started

  • Quick Overview: If you’ve just started with Mistral, this short article will help you understand the main Mistral ideas and concepts.

  • Frequently Asked Questions: Some of the typical questions you have may have already been answered here.

For End Users

  • User Documentation: If you’re going to use Mistral functionality as an end user, i.e. writing and running workflows, then you need to read the full user documentation that tells about all Mistral features, including the full description of the Mistral Workflow Language and Mistral ReST API.

  • Mistral Workflow Language (v2): If you just want a direct link to the full specification of the Mistral Workflow Language, this is it.

  • REST API V2: This is where you can find the full specification of the Mistral REST API.

For Administrators and Operators

For Developers

  • Mistral Coding Guidelines: No matter what you’re going to develop regarding Mistral, please read the coding guidelines we accept in our project.

  • Developer Documentation: If you want to contribute to the project or write Mistral extensions, please start here.

  • Writing Mistral Extensions: Read this section if you want to write custom Mistral actions and other extensions.

Workflow Visualization (CloudFlow)

  • CloudFlow: If you’re looking for a nice workflow visualization tool then visit this web page. CloudFlow provides a nice UI for debugging and analysing workflow executions.

Main Chapters