IOC is an age old concept we are so familiar with via spring framework. This enables us to invert the flow of control and avoid tight coupling between the modules of the system.

Conductor is a Microservice Orchestration Framework from Netflix. It helps us to avoid Choreography in microservice. If you are not familiar with Orchestration vs Choreography concepts, I highly encourage you to pickup a copy of Building Microservice , or have a quick read:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4127241/orchestration-vs-choreography 

Essentially Conductor is a IOC framework for your microservices. You take the flow of control out of your microservices and push it in the “Conductor WorkFlow“.

NOTE: there are other frameworks implementing similar concepts : https://github.com/ing-bank/baker
https://camunda.com/products/bpmn-engine/ 

Now Imagine you have Multiple Microservices Deployed in Cloud and OnPrem Datacentre and a flow as below:

Only problem is, you don’t have any direct internet connection from the CLOUD to your onprem hosted Service B . Why you have that service B onprem you might ask? May be its talking to an onprem legacy database, or a million $ video transcoder that you can’t export to the cloud. (Onprem datacentres are here to stay, stop dreaming!!!)

This is why IOC comes in play, The famous Hollywood principle: “Don’t Call Me, I’ll Call You” at its finest! Instead of the FLOW calling  Service B, Service B can call the FLOW for its Designated Task. Having something like Conductor which enables you to invert this dependency is priceless (otherwise you’d be filling forms and chasing people for months trying to open up corporate firewall to the internet) :

NOTE: The task queue is logical component here, there is no kafka/activemq , Conductor uses a simple Redis / Mysql Database to maintain the Queue and provides nice REST api to GET/PUT tasks. You can compare this to event driven architecture/pub sub model with IOC in place (think Polling !). You achieve similar benefit but without the complexity of having a message BUS.