How One Developer Structured a 20-Crate Rust API with Strict Layered Architecture
A developer building IronFlow, a Rust-based workflow engine, adopted a strict layered architecture across a 20-crate Cargo workspace to address the scalability limits of single-file API designs. The project separates concerns into distinct crates — including ironflow-store, ironflow-engine, ironflow-api, and ironflow-auth — with dependencies flowing only downward, preventing REST handlers from directly accessing SQL queries. At the core of IronFlow is a finite state machine that governs workflow lifecycle, with all valid status transitions explicitly defined using Rust's matches! macro for clarity and compiler-enforced safety. Terminal-to-same-terminal state transitions are treated as idempotent, simplifying concurrency handling across workers. The author shares both the architectural decisions that proved effective and those they would revisit, offering a practical reference for production-grade Rust API design.
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