Getting Started
Overview
Upstash Workflow lets you write durable, reliable and performant serverless functions. Get delivery guarantees, automatic retries on failure, scheduling and more without managing any infrastructure.
Key Features
Failure Resilience
If your platform experiences a temporary outage, your workflow can pick up right where it left off, ensuring stability even in unstable environments.
Long-Running Executions
Run long-running REST endpoints, such as complex AI models or video processing tools, even on serverless platforms with strict time limits.
Events with Wait/Notify Mechanism
Create workflows that wait for external events before proceeding. Ideal for user confirmations and asynchronous notifications.
Scheduled Jobs
Run jobs at regular intervals with support for cron expressions. Perfect for recurring tasks like reminders, reports, or newsletters.
Parallel Runs
Start independent tasks in parallel and wait for them to finish simultaneously, reducing latency.
Long Delays
Need your code to “sleep” for days, weeks, or even months? Supports long delays beyond serverless time limits.
Delivery Guarantees
Ensures at-least-once delivery. Failed requests are logged in a Dead Letter Queue to prevent data loss.
Rate Limiting (Coming Soon)
Prevent overwhelming external services by configuring rate limits, controlling operations per second, and managing burst traffic.
Observability
Monitor workflow steps with insights. Filter events to track successes, failures, retries, and stalls.
Quickstarts
Workflow supports Next.js, Cloudflare Workers and many more frameworks in TypeScript and Python.
Next.js
Build a Next.js application with QStash Workflow
Cloudflare Workers
Use and deploy Upstash Workflow on Cloudflare Workers
Next.js & FastAPI
Use Upstash Workflow for Python with Next.js and FastAPI
Example Use Cases
Here are some example real world use-cases for Upstash Workflow:
Agents
Use LLM Agents equipped with custom tools to achieve tasks
AI Data Processing
Download a large dataset without timeouts, process the data in chunks and generate a report.
Waiting For Events
Control workflow execution with events, log event data and send emails
Authorization Webhook
Start a workflow from a webhook. Handle user creation, trial management, email reminders and notifications.
Customer Onboarding
Register a new user, send welcome emails, and periodically check and respond to the user’s activity state with emails.
E-Commerce Order Fulfillment
Receive an order request, verify the stock, process the payment, and handle order dispatch and customer notifications.
Image Processing
Manage uploading images to the data store. Apply filters and resize the images to different resolutions in parallel.
Retry Payments
Retry payments with a day of delay, send emails, and suspend account if payment fails after the retries.
How it works
Upstash Workflow builds on the principle of steps. Instead of defining a single, complex piece of business logic, workflows contain multiple individual steps.
In case of an error, a failed step is retried individually without needing to re-run any previous steps. Instead of the entire business logic, each step can take up your serverless function execution duration, and many more benefits.
Code example
Let’s see a practical implementation of Upstash Workflow using customer onboarding as an example. See our Next.js Quickstart or FastAPI Quickstart for a complete guide.
Any HTTP request using context.call, like the AI-generation above, does not
count towards your function’s execution time and does not increase your
serverless bill. It can also run for up to 2 hours, completely bypassing any
platform-specific function timeouts.
Once your endpoint is ready, you can trigger the workflow via our SDKs or using plain REST. See here for details.
The above example should give you a rough idea of how a workflow looks in code. For step-by-step instructions on setting up your first workflow with images along the way, see our Next.js Quickstart or FastAPI Quickstart.
Here are more details about what the context object does:
- context.run
- context.sleep
- context.sleepUntil
- context.call
- context.waitForEvent
- context.notify
- context.cancel
See caveats for more complex API usage and best-practices when using Upstash Workflow.
Guides on common workflow topics:
- Cancel a running workflow
- Wait for External Events
- Handle failed workflow runs
- Monitor active workflows in real-time
- Schedule repeated workflow runs
- Secure a workflow endpoint
- Handle workflow route code changes
- Develop your workflows locally
- Pricing
If you’re curious about the behind-the-scenes about how we ensure separate step execution or prevent serverless timeouts, we wrote about it here! :)
Here is our Upstash Workflow roadmap to see what we planned for the future.
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