Workflows

Is it possible to integrate Google Workspace tools such as Calendar, Sheets, and Forms with Workflows? For example, can you trigger a workflow from a Google Form or a Sheet? Turns out, this is not only possible but also easier than you might think. Let me show you how with a sample use case. Use case Imagine you are an administrator in charge of allocating virtual machines (VM) in your cloud infrastructure to users. Read More →

In Workflows, it’s easy to chain various services together into an automated workflow. For some use cases, you might need to pause workflow execution and wait for some input. This input could be a human approval or an external service calling back with data needed to complete the workflow. ​​With Workflows callbacks, a workflow can create an HTTP endpoint and pause execution until it receives an HTTP callback to that endpoint. Read More →

At Google Cloud I/O, we announced the public preview of Cloud Run jobs. Unlike Cloud Run services that run continuously to respond to web requests or events, Cloud Run jobs run code that performs some work and quits when the work is done. Cloud Run jobs are a good fit for administrative tasks such as database migration, scheduled work like nightly reports, or doing batch data transformation. In this post, I show you a fully serverless, event-driven application to take screenshots of web pages, powered by Cloud Run jobs, Workflows, and Eventarc. Read More ↗︎

In Workflows, sometimes, you need to store some state, a key/value pair, in a step in one execution and later read that state in another step in another execution. There’s no intrinsic key/value store in Workflows. However, you can use Firestore as a key/value store and that’s what I want to show you here. If you want to skip to see some samples, check out workflow.yaml. If you want to learn more about it, keep reading. Read More →

We’re happy to announce that you can now create Eventarc triggers to directly target Workflows destinations. Available as a preview feature, it simplifies event-driven orchestrations by enabling you to route Eventarc events to Workflows without having an intermediary service. Integrating Eventarc and Workflows In a previous post, we talked about how to integrate Eventarc and Workflows. Since there was no direct integration between the two services, we had to deploy an intermediary Cloud Run service to receive events from Eventarc and then use the Workflows API to kick off a Workflows execution. Read More ↗︎

Sometimes, you need to run a piece of code for hours, days, or even weeks. Cloud Functions and Cloud Run are my default choices to run code. However, they both have limitations on how long a function or container can run. This rules out the idea of executing long-running code in a serverless way. Thanks to Workflows and Compute Engine, you can have an almost serverless experience with long running code. Read More ↗︎

It’s common to have a separate database for each service in microservices-based architectures. This pattern ensures that the independently designed and deployed microservices remain independent in the data layer as well. But it also introduces a new problem: How do you implement transactions (single units of work, usually made up of multiple operations) that span multiple microservices each with their own local database? In a traditional monolith architecture, you can rely on ACID transactions (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) against a single database. Read More ↗︎

If you’re like me, you probably use VS Code to author your Workflows JSON or YAML. You also probably expect some kind syntax validation or auto-completion as you work on your workflow. Unfortunately, there’s no VS Code extension for Workflows and Cloud Code for VS Code does not support Workflows. However, there’s a way to get partial auto-completion for Workflows in VS Code. VS Code and JSON Schema VS Code has the ability to display auto-complete suggestions for JSON and YAML files out of the box. Read More →

The Workflows team recently announced the general availability of iteration syntax and connectors! Iteration syntax supports easier creation and better readability of workflows that process many items. You can use a for loop to iterate through a collection of data in a list or map, and keep track of the current index. If you have a specific range of numeric values to iterate through, you can also use range-based iteration. Read More ↗︎

I’m a big fan of using Workflows to orchestrate and automate services running on Google Cloud and beyond. In Workflows, you can define a workflow in a YAML or JSON file and deploy it using gcloud or using Google Cloud Console. These approaches work but a more declarative and arguably better approach is to use Terraform. Let’s see how to use Terraform to define and deploy workflows and explore options for keeping Terraform configuration files more manageable. Read More ↗︎