Workflow overview

Note

Dapr Workflow is currently in alpha.

Dapr Workflow makes orchestrating the logic required for messaging, state management, and failure handling across various microservices easier for developers. Dapr Workflow enables you to create long running, fault-tolerant, stateful applications. Prior to Dapr Workflow, you’d often need to build ad-hoc workflows in custom, complex code in order to achieve long running, fault-tolerant, stateful applications.

The durable, resilient Dapr Workflow capability:

• Offers a built-in workflow runtime for driving Dapr Workflow execution
• Provides SDKs for authoring workflows in code, using any language
• Provides HTTP and gRPC APIs for managing workflows (start, query, suspend/resume, terminate)

Some example scenarios that Dapr Workflow can perform are:

• Order processing involving inventory management, payment systems, shipping, etc.
• HR onboarding workflows coordinating tasks across multiple departments and participants.
• Orchestrating the roll-out of digital menu updates in a national restaurant chain.
• Image processing workflows involving API-based classification and storage.

With Dapr Workflow, you can write activites and then compose those activities together into a workflow. Workflow activities are:

• The basic unit of work in a workflow
• The tasks that get orchestrated in the business process

Child workflows

Same as Dapr actors, you can schedule reminder-like durable delays for any time range.

and reminders

Workflow HTTP calls to manage a workflow

When you create an application with workflow code and run it with Dapr, you can call specific workflows that reside in the application. Each individual workflow can be:

• Started or terminated through a POST request
• Queried through a GET request

Learn more about how manage a workflow using HTTP calls.

You can call other workflow runtimes (for example, Temporal and Netflix Conductor) by writing your own workflow component.

Workflow patterns

Dapr Workflow simplifies complex, stateful coordination requirements in microservice architectures. The following sections describe several application patterns that can benefit from Dapr Workflow.

The Dapr Workflow authoring SDKs are language-specific SDKs that contain types and functions to implement workflow logic. The workflow logic lives in your application and is orchestrated by the Dapr Workflow engine running in the Dapr sidecar via a gRPC stream.

Supported SDKs

You can use the following SDKs to author a workflow.

Try out workflows

Want to put workflows to the test? Walk through the following quickstart and tutorials to see workflows in action:

Start using workflows directly in your app

Want to skip the quickstarts? Not a problem. You can try out the workflow building block directly in your application. After Dapr is installed, you can begin using workflows, starting with .

Watch :

Next steps