Alex Miłowski, geek

What is a workflow as code annotations?

Many programming languages allow code annotations and some enable these annotations to define or change the behavior of the annotated code. In Python, this is often a convenient way to package registration and wrapping “core behavior” for interacting with a more complicated system. For a workflow, this is a convenient mechanism for registering and packaging a workflow task as a Python function into the workflow.

What is workflow as a DSL?

A DSL (Domain Specific Language) is typically a separate artifact (a file) that describes an object (i.e., the workflow) using a “language” encoded in some syntax. In workflow orchestration systems, there is a high prevalence of using a generic syntax like YAML or JSON to encode the workflow description.

Which is better?

The answer is somewhat subjective. If your whole world is Python, the code annotation approach is very attractive. Systems that use this approach often make it very easy to get things working quickly. When your world gets a little more complicated, it isn’t a stretch to imagine how a task in a workflow might call a remote implementation.