December 29, 2025
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Obelisk 0.32: Cancellation, WebAPI, Postgres
Cancel button, web knobs, Postgres—crowd asks “Which Obelisk?”
TLDR: Obelisk 0.32 adds gentle, cooperative task cancellation, a simple Web API, and Postgres for sturdier multi‑server setups. Comments fixate on name confusion with another Obelisk and debate whether this rivals DBOS, while most cheer easier visibility and fewer “lost data” scares.
Obelisk 0.32 drops three crowd-pleasers: a cooperative cancel so long-running tasks politely stop, a Web API that speaks plain text and JSON, and Postgres for real multi‑server reliability. The vibe? Equal parts applause and eyebrow raises. First up, name confusion: kreyenborgi rushed in to clarify it’s not the other Obelisk, spawning jokes about “Obelisk Cinematic Universe.” Then oulipo2 lit the comparison fuse: Is this like DBOS? Cue a mini flame war over whether Obelisk is a workflow orchestrator, a job runner, or “Temporal with manners.”
Fans loved the WebAPI move—no more gRPC-only (that’s a developer-to-developer protocol); you can now just hit /v1/executions and get human‑readable text or JSON. One meme summed it up: “gRPC for robots, HTTP for humans.” Ops folks cheered Postgres as the end of “oops, my last transactions vanished” during crashes, while the SQLite crowd defended simplicity and Litestream backups with a shrug emoji.
The spiciest split: cancellation. Obelisk only cancels the pieces—activities and delays—so the whole workflow can run cleanup for that satisfying all‑or‑nothing finish. Supporters call it “saga-friendly and sane.” Skeptics want a big red kill switch. Either way, everyone agrees: visibility got better, and reliability just leveled up.
Key Points
- •Obelisk 0.32 introduces cooperative cancellation for workflows and activities, building on fallible operations (including persistent sleep).
- •Cancellation is initiated via gRPC or the new WebAPI, and workflows are canceled by targeting leaf activities and delay requests.
- •The WebAPI on port 5005 now supports text-over-HTTP and JSON output, expanding beyond prior gRPC/gRPC-Web-only interfaces.
- •PostgreSQL support enables multi-node deployments and high availability, addressing downtime and replication-loss issues seen with SQLite + Litestream.
- •SQLite remains supported with Litestream for backup/restore and S3-compatible endpoints, but asynchronous replication can lose recent committed transactions on crashes.