Workflows publishes connectors to make it easier to access other Google Cloud products within a workflow. For a detailed reference of available connectors, see the Connectors reference .
Connectors can be used to connect to other Google Cloud APIs within a workflow, and to integrate your workflows with those Google Cloud products. For example, you can use connectors to publish Pub/Sub messages, read or write data to a Firestore database, or retrieve authentication keys from Secret Manager. Learn how to use a connector .
Connectors simplify calling services because they handle the formatting of requests for you, providing methods and arguments so that you don't need to know the details of a Google Cloud API.
Connectors have built-in behavior for handling retries and long-running operations .
Authentication
Connectors use built-in Identity and Access Management authentication to interact with other
Google Cloud products. Note that a workflow using a connector still
needs to have proper permissions assigned to its service account to properly
authenticate to a given API. For example, to publish a message to
Pub/Sub, the service account associated with your workflow needs to be
granted the roles/pubsub.publisher
role
.
To learn more about authenticating to other Google Cloud products, see Grant a workflow permission to access Google Cloud resources
.
Retries
All connectors apply the following retry policy and error handling configurations:
-
Workflows uses an idempotent retry policy for GET requests.
-
Workflows uses a non-idempotent retry policy for all other HTTP methods.
-
By default, requests time out after 30 minutes. Note that for long-running operations, this applies to individual requests (for example, starting the operation or checking its status) within the long-running operation. The timeout for the entire operation can be configured using the
connector_paramsfield. See the Connectors reference .
Long-running operations
For calls performing a long-running operation, the following behaviors apply:
-
Workflows blocks the workflow execution until the operation completes successfully or fails.
-
By default, calls time out after 30 minutes. The timeout of the call can be changed using the
connector_paramsfield (to a maximum of one year). See the Connectors reference . -
Connectors poll long-running operations periodically. By default, Workflows uses an exponential backoff of 1.25 when polling, starting with 1 second and slowing to 60 seconds between polls. Each polling attempt counts as a billable step. The polling parameters can be changed using the
connector_paramsfield. See the Connectors reference . -
The preceding retry mechanism applies to a failed polling attempt.
-
Poll responses are checked and if the response payload is invalid, a
ResponseTypeErrorerror is returned. -
When an error occurs during a long-running operation, Workflows raises an
OperationErrorerror. The error includes an additional attribute,error, which contains operation-specific details.
If a long-running operation fails, the connector call throws an exception with the following attributes:
-
message: Human-readable error message. -
tags: A list of tags. For a long-running operation connector call, the list includesOperationError. -
operation: The failed long-running operation object.
For a detailed list of supported long-running operation types, see the Connectors reference .
