Every year in France, around mid-September, there’s a special weekend where everyone can visit some famous places, usually closed the rest of the year. That’s “Journée du Patrimoine”. For example, you can visit places like the Elysée Palace or the Matignon Palace, if you want to see where the French president, or the French prime minister work. However, for some of those places, it’s tricky to register online to book a slot, as there’s always a high demand for them. Read more...

There are different ways to launch the execution of a workflow. In previous articles, we mentioned that you can use the gcloud command-line tool to create an execution, you can also use the various client libraries to invoke Workflows, or use the REST API. A workflow itself can also invoke other workflows! But today, I’d like to tell you how to schedule the execution of a workflow. For that purpose, we’ll take advantage of Cloud Scheduler. Read more...

Workflows allows you to call APIs, whether from or hosted on Google Cloud, or any external API in the wild. A few days ago, for example, we saw an example on how to use the SendGrid API to send emails from a workflow. However, in that article, I had the API key hard-coded into my workflow, which is a bad practice. Instead, we can store secrets in Secret Manager. Workflows has a specific connector for Secret Manager, and a useful method to access secrets. Read more...

Following up the article on writing and reading JSON files in cloud storage buckets (GCS), we saw that we could access the data of the JSON file, and use it in our workflow. Let’s have a look at a concrete use of this. Today, we’ll take advantage of this mechanism to avoid hard-coding the URLs of the APIs we call from our workflow. That way, it makes the workflow more portable across environments. Read more...

Following up the article on writing and reading JSON files in cloud storage buckets, we saw that we could access the data of the JSON file, and use it in our workflow. Let’s have a look at a concrete use of this. Today, we’ll take advantage of this mechanism to avoid hard-coding the URLs of the APIs we call from our workflow. That way, it makes the workflow more portable across environments. Read more...

At enterprises across industries, documents are at the center of core business processes. Documents store a treasure trove of valuable information whether it’s a company’s invoices, HR documents, tax forms and much more. However, the unstructured nature of documents make them difficult to work with as a data source. We call this “dark data” or unstructured data that businesses collect, process and store but do not utilize for purposes such as analytics, monetization, etc. Read more...

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...

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...