Serverless orchestration and automation with Cloud Workflows

Serverless orchestration and automation
with GCPWorkﬂows
October 2020 - Bucharest, Romania
Márton Kodok / @martonkodok
Google Developer Expert at REEA.net

● Among the Top3 romanians on Stackoverflow 185k reputation
● Google Developer Expert on Cloud technologies
● Crafting Web/Mobile backends at REEA.net
● BigQuery + Redis database engine expert
Slideshare: martonkodok
Twitter: @martonkodok
StackOverflow: pentium10
GitHub: pentium10
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok
About me

1. Challenges in connecting services
2. What is Workﬂows? - HTTP based service orchestration and automation
3. Introduction to Workﬂows - automate complex processes
4. Practical use cases
5. Automate, orchestrate and provide reliableline-of-business automation
6. Conclusions
Agenda

Connectivity - should be easy, but in reality you need to figure out
● Common connection format
● Make the connections
● Parse the results
● Decisions and conditional step executions
● Error handling, logging
● Retries
● Scaling up and down to zero
● Authentication
Challenges in connecting services

Meet Workﬂows
https://cloud.google.com/workﬂows

Step-Automation-as-a-Service - Serverless HTTP service automation
Familiar Syntax (YAML, Steps, HTTP request, JSON, arrays)
Decent pricing (internal: $1/100K steps, external: $2.5/100K) *Oct 2020
Built-in decision and conditional executions expression formulas, operation on var
Subworkflows similar to routine in a programming language with input/return var
Support for external API calls out of the box support outside of Google Cloud
Integrates with any Google Cloud product without worrying about authentication
What is GCP Workﬂows?

Invoking an HTTP endpoint
Assigning a variable
Sleeping
Creating the logic for conditional jumps
Returning a value
Steps supported

hello.yaml
Hello, Cloud Workﬂows!
workflowRevisionId: 000001-de1
argument: 'null'
startTime: '2020-10-16T20:19:34.448323739Z'
name:
projects/985596417983/locations/us-central1/workflows/hello/executions/95c99744-c73c-
4065-a696-940bc7658c33
result: '"Hello, Cloud Workflows!"'
endTime: '2020-10-16T20:19:34.845536315Z'
state: SUCCEEDED
Deploying gcloud beta workflows deploy hello --source=hello.yaml
Executing gcloud beta workflows execute hello

Console - execute workflows from Google Cloud Console
gcloud - from terminal/shell
REST API - from any service by using a service account for Authentication
Executing a workﬂow

Sample Workﬂows

http_get.yaml
Making an external HTTP GET request
[
"Dacia",
"Dacia Logan",
"Dacians",
"Dacia Duster",
"Dacia Sandero",
"Dacian language",
"Dacian bracelets",
"Dacian Draco",
"Dacian warfare",
"Dacia Maraini"
]

http_post.yaml
Making an external HTTP POST request
{
"archived":false,
"created_at":"2020-10-16T17:40:17+0000",
"id":"bit.ly/35452TM",
"link":"https://bit.ly/35452TM",
"long_url":"<truncated>",
}

wikipedia.yaml
Sequence two steps to get data from Wikipedia

switch.yaml
Switch block
9 13 14
9
13
14

dictionary.yaml
Declaring a dictionary and an array

iteratingarray.yaml
Iterating through an array

expressions.yaml
Evaluating an expression with type casting

subworkflow.yaml
Subworkﬂow
call
call
def

exceptions.yaml
Catching and handling HTTP request errors
exc
17
27
Note: If an exception is not recognized, the workﬂow execution fails and throws the exception as returned by the GET request.

retries.yaml
Retries
Retries HTTP status codes [429, 502, 503, 504], connection error, or timeout

Conclusions

Reliable workflow execution - execute workflows for enterprise business apps
Low latency of execution - no cold starts
Built-in error handling out of the box error handling with configurable retry policies
Passing variable built-in JSON parsing and expression-based variable manipulation
Rich runtime iterating through an array, embedded steps for readability
Reading from Firestore read/write an entry using Yaml syntax
Cloud Logging out of the box integration with Cloud Logging
Beneﬁts of Cloud Workﬂows

“Enables kids to build their ﬁrst serverless
product by using only YAML language.
Google Cloud Workﬂows

“Automate, orchestrate and provide reliable
line-of-business automation,
Like a clone of your best handyman
Google Cloud Workﬂows

Easy to build/operate
Scales out
Does not lose state
Handles errors/timeouts
Out-of-the-box support of Cloud APIs
Auditable
Developer friendly

The possibilities are endless
Marketing Retail IndustrialandIoT Developer
Event driven marketing
workflow execution
Relay conversions to
customer profiles in external
services
Workflow based emails,
discounts, promotions
Order management
Inventory chain operations
Data gathering and
processing
Synchronize systems
Generate state machines
Verify equipment lifecycle
Workflow based
maintenance needs
Digitalization of internal
policies
Automate the Cloud
Shell-script replacement
Orchestrate devops
workflows
@martonkodok

Thank you. Q&A.
Slides available on:
slideshare.net/martonkodok
Reea.net - Integrated web solutions driven by creativity
to deliver projects.

Serverless orchestration and automation with Cloud Workflows

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

More from Márton Kodok

More from Márton Kodok (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Serverless orchestration and automation with Cloud Workflows