Workflows overview

Workflows is a fully managed orchestration platform that executes services in an order that you define: a workflow. These workflows can combine services including custom services hosted on Cloud Run or Cloud Run functions, Google Cloud services such as Cloud Vision AI and BigQuery, and any HTTP-based API.

By incorporating Workflows into solutions, you can make service dependencies explicit and observable end-to-end. A workflow that specifies an application, operational, or business process provides a source-of-truth or canonical narrative for the process.

Workflows is serverless, scaling up as needed, and no charges are incurred while idle. Because a workflow contains no code or library dependencies, it does not require security patches. Once you deploy a workflow, you can expect it to reliably execute without maintenance. A workflow can hold state, retry, poll, or wait for up to a year.

Workflows is compliant with these certifications and standards.

The following diagram shows an example of using Workflows to orchestrate services:

Service orchestration using Workflows

Key use cases

Workflows supports many use cases. Some examples are:

Service orchestration Create solutions by combining services—Perform a sequence of operations across multiple systems, waiting for all operations to complete. Can be event-driven. For example:
  • Send newly uploaded files to Cloud Vision AI, then write tags into Firestore
  • Call a Cloud Run function and send the results to a Cloud Run service
Batch jobs Operate on multiple items—Perform operations on a set of items or batch data. Often scheduled. For example:
  • Send daily customer emails
  • Prepare and run BigQuery or machine learning jobs
  • Generate reports
Business processes Automate line-of-business workflows—Encode the steps in a business process, including conditions, actions, and human-in-the-loop events. For example:
  • Track an order from request to fulfillment
  • Automate resource requests with approvals
IT process automation Managed execution of service operations—Easily script sequences of Google Cloud service operations. For example:
  • Provision new tenant projects or infrastructure
  • Turn down resources on a schedule or through event triggers

Core concepts

A workflow consists of a series of steps described using the Workflows syntax, and can be written in either YAML or JSON. This is the workflow's definition. For a detailed explanation of the Workflows syntax, see the Syntax reference.

After a workflow is created, it is deployed, which makes the workflow ready for execution. Learn how to create and update a workflow in the Google Cloud console or by using the Google Cloud CLI. You can also create your workflow by using a preferred IDE or source code editor and setting up autocompletion and syntax validation.

An