Comment by KraftyOne

Building a complex stateful system will always be hard, but workflows as an abstraction have two big benefits:

1. Automatic handling of any transient failures or service interruptions/crashes/restarts. Transient failures in steps are automatically retried, and service interruptions are automatically recovered from. Even if you're doing your own bookkeeping, doing _recovery_ from that bookkeeping isn't easy, and workflows do it automatically.

2. Built-in observability. Workflows naturally support built-in observability and tooling that isn't easy to build yourself. DBOS integrates with OpenTelemetry, automatically generating complete traces of your workflows and giving you a dashboard to view them from (and because it's all OTel, you can also feed the traces into your existing obs infrastructure). So it's easier to spot a step getting stuck or failing unexpectedly.

Another advantage of DBOS specifically, versus other workflow engines, is that all its bookkeeping is in Postgres and well-documented (https://docs.dbos.dev/explanations/system-tables), so you have full and complete control over your workflows if you need it.