Google Cloud Workflows Now Generally Available

Source:-https://www.infoq.com/

Google has recently announced that Google Cloud Workflows, the service to orchestrate Google Cloud and HTTP-based API services with serverless workflows, is now generally available. Workflows Connectors are now in public preview.

Google Cloud Workflows requires no infrastructure management and scales on demand, including scaling down to zero if no requests are processed, It can be used to develop complex serverless applications, building on workflows that connect series of serverless tasks together in a predetermined order and work with other managed services like Google Cloud’s APIs, Cloud Functions or Cloud Run.

Among the features of the new service, an error handling with configurable retry policies, a reliable workflow execution targeted to enterprise and line-of-business applications and the ability to pass information between steps using JSON parsing and expression-based variable manipulations. Workflows publishes connectors to make it easier to access other Google Cloud APIs within a workflow.

Among the use cases that can benefit from workflows, inventory management processes, e-commerce transactions and other services that require an orchestration layer. Filip Knapik, product manager at GCP, wrote an article before the GA that covers examples for Workflows such as processing files uploaded to a storage bucket, tagging the files based on the extension. He explains:
GCP is not the only cloud provider offering managed workflows. Microsoft has Azure Logic Apps and Amazon introduced AWS Step Function over four years ago. Tim Bray, formerly VP/distinguished engineer at AWS, wrote a detailed comparison between the AWS and GCP services. But regardless of which features they offer and the maturity of the different services, he concludes that choosing the workflow service is a platform choice:

Google Cloud Workflows has a pay-per-use pricing model based on the number of steps and the number of external HTTP calls, with the first 5000 steps and 2000 HTTP calls free every month.