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type title linkTitle weight description
docs Workflow overview Overview 1000 Overview of Dapr Workflow

{{% alert title="Note" color="primary" %}} Dapr Workflow is currently in alpha. {{% /alert %}}

Dapr Workflow makes orchestrating logic for messaging, state management, and failure handling across various microservices easier for developers. Prior to adding workflows to Dapr, you'd often need to build ad-hoc workflows behind-the-scenes in order to bridge that gap.

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)
  • Will integrate with future supported external workflow runtime components
Diagram showing basics of Dapr Workflows

Dapr Workflows can assist with scenarios like:

  • 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

Features

Workflows and activities

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

[Learn more about workflow activities.]({{< ref "workflow-features-concepts.md##workflow-activities" >}})

Child workflows

In addition to activities, you can write workflows to schedule other workflows as child workflows. A child workflow is independent of the parent workflow that started it and support automatic retry policies.

[Learn more about child workflows.]({{< ref "workflow-features-concepts.md#child-workflows" >}})

Timers and reminders

Like in user-defined actors, you can schedule reminder-like durable delays for any time range.

[Learn more about workflow timers]({{< ref "workflow-features-concepts.md#durable-timers" >}}) and [reminders]({{< ref "workflow-architecture.md#reminder-usage-and-execution-guarantees" >}})

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.]({{< ref workflow_api.md >}})

Manage other workflow runtimes with workflow components

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

Workflow patterns

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

Learn more about different types of workflow patterns

Workflow SDKs

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.

Language stack Package
.NET Dapr.Workflow
Go todo
Java todo

Try out workflows

Quickstarts and tutorials

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

Quickstart/tutorial Description
[Workflow quickstart]({{< ref workflow-quickstart.md >}}) Run a .NET workflow application with four workflow activities to see Dapr Workflow in action
Workflow .NET SDK example Learn how to create a Dapr Workflow and invoke it using ASP.NET Core web APIs.

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]({{< ref install-dapr-cli.md >}}), you can begin using workflows, starting with [how to author a workflow]({{< ref howto-author-workflow.md >}}).

Watch the demo

Watch this video for an overview on Dapr Workflows:

Next steps

{{< button text="Workflow features and concepts >>" page="workflow-features-concepts.md" >}}

Related links