Part 7 of our Workflows Unleashed series. This week: why the best infrastructure decision is the one you can change later.
The first question every engineering team asks about a new tool: "Where does it run?"
And the answer they want is always the same: "Wherever makes sense for us."
Some teams want managed SaaS — zero infrastructure, instant setup, someone else handles the upgrades. Some teams need on-premise — data sovereignty, air-gapped networks, regulatory requirements. Most teams want a bit of both — sensitive workloads on their own hardware, everything else in the cloud.
Flomation supports all three. Not as an afterthought or an enterprise upsell, but as a fundamental property of the architecture.
Flomation is built from three independent services:
Flow storage, execution management, user authentication, and the revision history. This is the central nervous system — it knows what flows exist, what state they're in, and who's allowed to do what with them. It talks to PostgreSQL for persistence and exposes a REST API consumed by the editor and the runners.
A React-based visual flow builder that runs in the browser. It communicates exclusively with the API over HTTP. There's no direct connection to the database, the runners, or any external service. This means the editor can be hosted anywhere that serves static files — a CDN, an S3 bucket, an internal web server, or the managed SaaS deployment.
The execution engine. Runners register with the API, receive a cryptographic keypair for payload signing, and poll for work. When an execution is available, the runner claims it atomically, downloads the flow definition, resolves variables and secrets, and executes the graph.
Runners are stateless. They don't store flows, secrets, or execution history. Everything they need comes from the API at claim time, and everything they produce goes back to the API on completion. You can add runners, remove runners, or restart runners without affecting in-flight executions (which are automatically reclaimed after a timeout).
The separation of API, editor, and runner isn't just about deployment flexibility — it's about scaling.
Add a second runner and it starts picking up work immediately. Add ten runners and the throughput increases linearly. There's no coordinator, no shard map, and no rebalancing — each runner independently claims work from the queue.
Runners use PostgreSQL's FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED to claim executions. This means two runners polling simultaneously never claim the same execution. It's not eventual consistency — it's transactional, immediate, and guaranteed.
Each runner can execute multiple flows concurrently. The max_concurrent_executors setting controls how many flows a single runner handles in parallel. Set it to 1 for sequential processing, or 10 for high-throughput workloads. Each concurrent execution runs in its own goroutine with its own context, timeout, and cancellation support.
For trigger services (schedule polling, S3 monitoring, Git polling), Flomation uses lease-based ownership. Each Launch instance claims a trigger with a 2-minute TTL. If the instance crashes, the lease expires and another instance picks up the trigger automatically. No manual intervention, no stuck triggers, no missed events.
Everything runs in the cloud. Sign up, build a flow, execute it. Infrastructure, upgrades, backups, and scaling are handled for you.
Deploy the API, editor, and runner binaries on your own servers. Point them at your own PostgreSQL database. Use your own TLS certificates, your own load balancer, your own DNS. The binaries are the same ones that run the SaaS deployment — there's no "community edition" with missing features.
Run the editor and API in the cloud for convenience. Deploy runners on your own network for data processing that can't leave your infrastructure. Sensitive database queries execute on a runner behind your firewall; notifications and reporting execute on cloud runners. Same flows, different execution locations.
Error handling — On Error nodes, conditional branching, retry loops, and why your automation should recover, not just report.
www.flomation.co — free to start, no credit card.