Getting Started

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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.

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Key Features

• Failure Resilience: If your platform experiences a temporary outage, your workflow can pick up right where it left off. Upstash Workflows ensures that your application will continue, even when your environment is unstable.
• Long-Running Executions on Time-Limited Platforms: 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 use cases like waiting for user input (e.g., clicking a confirmation email) or handling asynchronous notifications from external systems.
• Scheduled Jobs: Run jobs at regular intervals with support for cron expressions. Perfect for recurring tasks like reminders, regular reports, or newsletters. Set up scheduled jobs here.
• Parallel Runs: Start independent tasks in parallel and wait for them to finish simultaneously, reducing latency. Read more about parallel runs here.
• Long Delays: Need your code to “sleep” for days, weeks, or even months? Upstash Workflows supports long delays beyond the time limits imposed by serverless platforms.
• Delivery Guarantees: Upstash Workflows guarantees at-least-once delivery. Once a request is accepted, it will run—even if the hosting platform experiences interruptions. In the rare case of failure, the request is logged in a Dead Letter Queue, so you never lose track of critical events.
• Cost Reduction for Serverless Environments: Serverless platforms charge based on execution time. With Upstash Workflows, you can offload time-consuming, I/O-bound tasks from serverless platforms, reducing operational costs. See cost reduction example here.
• Rate Limiting (Coming Soon): Prevent overwhelming external services by configuring rate limits for your workflows. Control the maximum number of operations per second, and ensure that burst traffic is managed without dropping any calls.
• Observability: Monitor your application’s steps with comprehensive insights. Filter events to see which functions succeeded, failed, retried, or stalled. Learn more about observability here.

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Quickstarts

Workflow supports Next.js, Cloudflare Workers and many more frameworks.

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Example Use Cases

Here are some example real world use-cases for Upstash Workflow:

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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.

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Next.js code example

Let’s see a practical implementation of Upstash Workflow using Next.js and customer onboarding as an example. See our Next.js Quickstart for a complete guide.

import { serve } from "@upstash/workflow/nextjs";
import { sendEmail } from "./emailUtils";

// Type-safety for starting our workflow
interface InitialData {
  userId: string
  email: string
  name: string
}

export const { POST } = serve<InitialData>(async (context) => {
  const { userId, email, name } = context.requestPayload;

  // Step 1: Send welcome email
  await context.run("send-welcome-email", async () => {
    await sendEmail(email, "Welcome to our service!");
  });

  // Step 2: Wait for 3 days (in seconds)
  await context.sleep("sleep-until-follow-up", 60 * 60 * 24 * 3);

  // Step 3: AI-generate personalized follow-up message
  const { body: aiResponse } = await context.call(
    "generate-personalized-message",
    {
      url: "https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions",
      method: "POST",
      headers: { ... }
      body: {
        model: "gpt-3.5-turbo",
        messages: [
          { role: "system", content: "You are an assistant creating personalized follow-up messages." },
          { role: "user", content: `Create a short, friendly follow-up message for ${name} who joined our service 3 days ago.` }
        ]
      },
    }
  );

  const personalizedMessage = aiResponse.choices[0].message.content;

  // Step 4: Send personalized follow-up email
  await context.run("send-follow-up-email", async () => {
    await sendEmail(email, personalizedMessage);
  });
});

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.

Here are more details about what the context object does:

• context.run
• context.sleep
• context.sleepUntil
• context.call
• context.waitForEvent
• context.notify

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.