name: DBOS Vocabulary
description: >-
  Shared vocabulary of terms used across DBOS Transact and DBOS Cloud for
  durable execution backed by Postgres.
terms:
  - term: Workflow
    definition: >-
      A function decorated with DBOS.workflow that runs to completion
      durably, surviving process and node failures.
  - term: Step
    definition: >-
      An idempotent unit of work inside a workflow, decorated with
      DBOS.step, automatically checkpointed and retryable.
  - term: Transaction
    definition: >-
      A workflow operation decorated with DBOS.transaction that wraps
      database work in a single ACID transaction.
  - term: Scheduled Workflow
    definition: >-
      A workflow decorated with DBOS.scheduled and a cron expression
      that runs exactly once per scheduled interval.
  - term: Queue
    definition: >-
      A durable, distributed queue persisted in Postgres for enqueueing
      workflows and tasks.
  - term: Communicator
    definition: >-
      An interaction with an external service performed inside a step
      with at-least-once delivery semantics.
  - term: Recovery Attempt
    definition: >-
      A bounded retry of a workflow after a worker failure, controlled
      by max_recovery_attempts.
  - term: Idempotency Key
    definition: >-
      A user-provided key used to deduplicate workflow invocations and
      guarantee exactly-once execution.
  - term: Kafka Consumer
    definition: >-
      A workflow decorated with DBOS.kafka_consumer that processes
      partitioned Kafka topics with ordering guarantees.
  - term: DBOSConfiguredInstance
    definition: >-
      A base class for stateful workflow instances tracked by name for
      recovery.
  - term: DBOS Cloud
    definition: >-
      The managed DBOS hosting platform that runs workflows, queues, and
      scheduled jobs serverlessly.
  - term: Application
    definition: >-
      A deployed unit on DBOS Cloud containing one or more workflows
      and steps.
  - term: Postgres Backing Store
    definition: >-
      The Postgres database used by DBOS to persist workflow state,
      checkpoints, and queues.