# Aquamarine

Fluence's Aquamarine stack is comprised of Aqua and Marine. Aqua is a programming language and runtime environment for peer-to-peer workflows. Marine, on the other hand, is a general purpose runtime that executes hosted code on nodes, whereas Aqua facilitates the programming of workflows composed from hosted code. In combination, Aqua and Marine enable any distributed application.

At the core of Aqua is the design ideal and idea to pair concurrent systems, and especially decentralized networks, with a programming and execution tool chain to avoid centralized bottlenecks commonly introduced with workflow engines and business rule engines. To this end,  Aqua manages the communication and coordination between services, devices, and APIs without introducing a centralized gateway and can be used to express various distributed systems: from simple request-response models to comprehensive network consensus algorithms.



