Mistral is a workflow service. Lots of computations in computer systems nowadays can be represented as processes that consist of multiple interconnected steps that need to run in a particular order. Those steps are often interactions with components distributed across different machines: real hardware machines, cloud virtual machines or containers. Mistral provides capabilities to automate such processes.
Particularly, Mistral can be used, for example, for solving administrator tasks related to managing clusters of software, or for any other tasks that span multiple components and take long to complete. It can also be used as a central component for deploying distributed software in a truly large scale. In any case where the ability to track the progress of the activity becomes crucial, Mistral is a good fit.
A Mistral user can describe such a process as a set of tasks and transitions between them, and upload such a definition to Mistral, which will take care of state management, correct execution order, parallelism, synchronization and high availability. In Mistral terminology such a set of tasks and relations between them is called a workflow.
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