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Serverless Workflow: A Vendor-Neutral DSL for Cloud-Native Orchestration

by Shriira Press

Serverless Workflow is a CNCF project that defines an open, vendor-neutral specification for describing workflows as declarative YAML or JSON documents. Instead of binding orchestration logic to one cloud's proprietary engine, it offers a single domain-specific language for expressing what a process should do, runnable on any conforming runtime. This book walks through the problem of orchestration lock-in, the structure of a workflow document, the twelve task types that form its vocabulary, how data flows and transforms with jq expressions, the event-driven features built on CloudEvents, the structured error and retry model, and the SDKs and runtimes that execute it. By the end you can read, write, and reason about Serverless Workflow definitions with confidence.

Contents

1. 1Preface
2. 2Chapter 1 — The Orchestration Problem
3. 3Chapter 2 — Anatomy of a Workflow Document
4. 4Chapter 3 — The Task Catalog
5. 5Chapter 4 — Data Flow and Expressions
6. 6Chapter 5 — Events and Scheduling
7. 7Chapter 6 — Errors, Retries, and Resilience
8. 8Chapter 7 — Runtimes, SDKs, and Practice