The document discusses Google Cloud Workflows, which provides serverless orchestration and automation capabilities. It introduces Workflows and describes how it can be used to connect services, integrate APIs, and automate complex processes. Several examples are provided, including using Workflows for e-commerce invoice generation, payment reminders, and IT management tasks. Benefits highlighted include reliable execution, low latency, built-in error handling, and developer friendliness.

1. Serverlessorchestrationandautomation
withCloudWorkflows
November 2020 - Canada, Alberta, Calgary, Edmonton
Márton Kodok / @martonkodok
Google Developer Expert at REEA.net

2. ● Among the Top 3 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
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GitHub: pentium10
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok
About me

3. 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 reliable line-of-business automation
6. Conclusions
Agenda
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok

4. 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
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok

5. Meet Workflows
https://cloud.google.com/workflows
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok

6. Workflows in Google Cloud portfolio
Introduction
Integrate any Google Cloud API,
SaaS API or private APIs.
Serverless
Compute
External
API’s
Google
API’s
etc...
Workflows - orchestrate & integrate
SaaS
API’s
Private
API’s
Other
Clouds

7. Step-Automation-as-a-Service - Serverless HTTP service automation
Declarative workflow language (YAML, JSON)
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?
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok

8. Authenticated calls to Google Cloud or external API’s
Integrations
Integrate any Google Cloud
API, SaaS API or private APIs.
Google Cloud General
Cloud
Run
Cloud
Functions
Firestore
Stackdriver
Logging
Compute
Engine
PubSub
Secret
Manager
HTTP
Authenticated
calls to Google
Cloud API’s
API

9. OAuth, OIDC, Secret Manager integration
Enterprise
Security
Keep your workflows secure
X
Authenticated
Invocations
Authenticated
calls to Google Cloud
services
Integration with
Secret Manager
Encryption at rest and
in transit
External API 1
External API 2 External API

10. Code example
@martonkodok
- callMyFunction:
call: http.get
args:
url: https://us-central1-project123.cloudfunctions.net/...
query:
metric: NoOfTrs
result: metricResult
- saveResult:
switch:
- condition: ${ metricResult.body.TrNo > 100 }
call: http.post
args:
url: https://mydeployment.notify....
body:
Metric: ${ metricResult.body.TrNo }
getMetric
TrNo>100?
End
YesNo
{“metric”:”NoOfTrs”}
Notify

11. hello.yaml
Hello, Cloud Workflows!
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok
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 --data={“var”:”value”}
Describing gcloud beta workflows executions describe-last

12. Sample Workflows
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok

13. E-commerce invoice generation with Workflows
Steps orchestration
Reliable execution, with error
handling and retries
Orchestration microservices
or other API’s
Create an invoice
Generate PDF
Send PDF via email

14. Sending reminders to accounts with overdue payments
Process array elements
Execute steps
conditionally
For each customer:
Get a list of customers
Send reminder
overdue
?
Yes

15. IT management automation
Combine automation with
scheduler
Wait for service checks
Orchestrate work across
Compute Engine, PubSub,
Stackdriver and other Google
Cloud Products
9 AM trigger
Start a Compute
Engine VM
Log the event
App
Started?
No
Wait 60 seconds
Notify the team

16. Code Examples
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok

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

18. wikipedia.yaml
Sequence two steps to get data from Wikipedia
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok

19. switch.yaml
Switch block
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok
9 13 14
9
13
14

20. subworkflow.yaml
Subworkflow
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok
call
call
def

21. retries.yaml
Retries
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok
Retries HTTP status codes [429, 502, 503, 504], connection error, or timeout

22. Conclusions
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok

23. 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
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok

24. “Automate, orchestrate and provide reliable
line-of-business automation.
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok
Google Cloud Workflows

25. “Enables kids to build their first serverless
product by using only YAML language.
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok
Google Cloud Workflows

26. Easy to build/operate
Scales out
Does not lose state
Handles errors/timeouts
Out-of-the-box support of Cloud APIs
Auditable
Developer friendly
Serverless orchestration and automation with GCP Workflows @martonkodok

27. 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

28. Thank you. Q&A.
Slides available on:
slideshare.net/martonkodok
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