Serverless Workflow: A Vendor-Neutral DSL for Cloud-Native Orchestration
Shriira Press
A vendor-neutral language for describing workflows that orchestrate services, functions, and events across any cloud.
Welcome to Serverless Workflow: A Vendor-Neutral DSL for Cloud-Native Orchestration.
Serverless Workflow is a CNCF project that defines an open, vendor-neutral specification for describing workflows as declarative documents written in YAML or JSON. Instead of binding orchestration logic to one cloud provider's proprietary engine, it gives developers a single domain-specific language for expressing what a process should do — call a service, wait for an event, branch on a condition, retry on failure — and lets any conforming runtime execute it. This book walks through that language and the ecosystem around it. We begin with the problem of orchestration lock-in and what the specification sets out to fix, then study the structure of a workflow document and its twelve task types. From there we examine how data flows and transforms between tasks, how the event-driven features tie into CloudEvents, how errors are caught and retried, and finally how SDKs and runtimes turn a document into running behavior. By the end you will be able to read, write, and reason about Serverless Workflow definitions with confidence.
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A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.
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