Workflows

Google Cloud Workflows is a fully managed orchestration service that lets you execute multi-step workflows by combining Google Cloud services, APIs, and custom code. Unlike event-driven, fire-and-forget patterns, Workflows provides a durable, stateful execution engine that tracks progress, handles errors, and supports long-running processes.

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What Are Workflows?

Workflows lets you define a series of steps — calling APIs, running Cloud Functions, invoking Cloud Run services, waiting for events, and performing logic — in a declarative YAML or JSON format. The Workflows engine executes each step, manages state, handles retries, and provides observability.

Key Characteristics

Characteristic	Description
Fully managed	No servers, clusters, or infrastructure to manage
Durable execution	State is persisted — workflows survive infrastructure failures
Long-running	Workflows can run for up to one year
Serverless pricing	Pay per step executed (first 5,000 steps/month free)
Built-in error handling	Try/catch, retry policies, and custom error handling
Connectors	Pre-built connectors for 20+ Google Cloud services

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Workflow Structure