Whether your company is processing e-commerce transactions, producing goods or delivering IT services, you need to manage the flow of work across a variety of systems. And while it’s possible to manage those workflows manually or with general-purpose tools, doing so is much easier with a purpose-built product.

Google Cloud has two workflow tools in its portfolio:  Cloud Composer and the new  Workflows.  Introduced in August, Workflows is a fully managed workflow orchestration product running as part of Google Cloud. It’s fully serverless and requires no infrastructure management.

In this article we’ll discuss some of the use cases that Workflows enables, its features, and tips on using it effectively.

A sample workflow

First, consider the following workflow for generating an invoice:

A common way to orchestrate these steps is to call API services based on  Cloud Functions, Cloud Run or a public SaaS API, e.g. SendGrid, which sends an e-mail with our PDF attachment. But real-life scenarios are typically much more complex than the example above and require continuous tracking of all workflow executions, error handling, decision points and conditional jumps, iterating arrays of entries, data conversions and many other advanced features.

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