Workflows provides several connectors for interacting with various Google Cloud APIs and services. In the past, I’ve used for example the Document AI connector to parse documents like expense receipts, or the Secret Manager connector to store and access secrets like passwords. Another useful connector I was interested in using today was the Google Cloud Storage connector, to store and read files stored in storage buckets. Those connectors are auto-generated from their API discovery descriptors, but there are some limitations currently that prevent, for example, to download the content of a file. Read more...

As I was working with my colleague Sara Ford on testing the Cloud Functions runtimes for the upcoming “second generation” of the product, rebased on the Cloud Run platform, I wrote a few simple functions for the Java runtime. In one of those Java functions, I wanted to use Google Cloud Storage, to download a file from a bucket. I took a look at the existing sample to download an object: Read more...

With Workflows, developers can easily orchestrate various services together, on Google Cloud or third-party APIs. Workflows connectors handle long-running operations of Google Cloud services till completion. And Workflow executions can also wait for time to pass with the built-in sys.sleep function, till some computation finishes, or some event takes place. But what if you need some user input or some approval in the middle of the workflow execution, like validating automatic text translation? Read more...

Workflows is a service to orchestrate not only Google Cloud services, such as Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, or machine learning APIs, but also external services. As you might expect from an orchestrator, Workflows allows you to define the flow of your business logic, as steps, in a YAML or JSON definition language, and provides an execution API and UI to trigger workflow executions. You can read more about the benefits of Workflows in our previous article. Read more...

Over the past year, we (Mete and Guillaume) have developed a picture sharing application, named Pic-a-Daily, to showcase Google Cloud serverless technologies such as Cloud Functions, App Engine, and Cloud Run. Into the mix, we’ve thrown a pinch of Pub/Sub for interservice communication, a zest of Firestore for storing picture metadata, and a touch of machine learning for a little bit of magic. We also created a hands-on workshop to build the application, and slides with explanations of the technologies used. Read more...

In the two previous episodes, we saw how to create and call subworkflows, and we applied this technique to making a reusable routine for logging with Cloud Logging. However, there’s already a built-in function for that purpose! So let’s have a look at this integration. To call the built-in logging function, just create a new step, and make a call to the sys.log function: - logString: call: sys.log args: text: Hello Cloud Logging! Read more...

Workflows are made of sequences of steps and branches. Sometimes, some particular sequence of steps can be repeated, and it would be a good idea to avoid error-prone repetitions in your workflow definition (in particular if you change in one place, and forget to change in another place). You can modularize your definition by creating subworkflows, a bit like subroutines or functions in programming languages. For example, yesterday, we had a look at how to log to Cloud Logging: if you want to log in several places in your workflow, you can extract that routine in a subworkflow. Read more...

Time to come back to our series on Cloud Workflows. Sometimes, for debugging purposes or for auditing, it is useful to be able to log some information via Cloud Logging. As we saw last month, you can call HTTP endpoints from your workflow. We can actually use Cloud Logging’s REST API to log such messages! Let’s see that in action. - log: call: http.post args: url: https://logging.googleapis.com/v2/entries:write auth: type: OAuth2 body: entries: - logName: ${"projects/" + sys. Read more...

In previous episodes of this Cloud Workflows series, we’ve learned about variable assignment, data structures like arrays, jumps and switch conditions to move between steps, and expressions to do some computations, including potentially some built-in functions. With all these previous learnings, we are now equipped with all the tools to let us create loops and iterations, like for example, iterating over the element of an array, perhaps to call an API several times but with different arguments. Read more...

Workflows are not necessarily instantaneous, and executions can span over a long period of time. Some steps may potentially launch asynchronous operations, which might take seconds or minutes to finish, but you are not notified when the process is over. So when you want for something to finish, for example before polling again to check the status of the async operation, you can introduce a sleep operation in your workflows. Read more...