[Reference Architecture] Decomposing Monolithic Control Planes via Durable Workflow Orchestration

### Name

Cloudera Data Warehouse Control Plane Modernization with Cadence

### Organization

Cloudera

### Team(s)

Data Warehouse

### Overview and Goals

This reference architecture documents how Cloudera modernized the provisioning control plane for Cloudera Data Warehouse by incrementally migrating from a monolithic, stateful executor to durable workflow orchestration using Cadence on Kubernetes.

The primary goals were to:

- Eliminate single points of failure in long-running provisioning workflows.
- Ensure infrastructure operations remain resilient to pod restarts, node replacements, and transient cloud failures.
- Adopt workflow orchestration without fully rewriting existing business logic.
- Improve observability, auditability, and operational debugging.
- Establish a reusable pattern for decomposing monolithic control-plane services.

This architecture is relevant to any organization running long-lived, stateful operations such as infrastructure provisioning, SaaS control planes, data pipelines, and platform lifecycle management.

### Projects

Cadence, Kubernetes

### Planned Evolution

Improvements in handling control plane upgrades.