Workflow overview

Dapr workflow makes it easy for developers to write business logic and integrations in a reliable way. Since Dapr workflows are stateful, they support long-running and fault-tolerant applications, ideal for orchestrating microservices. Dapr workflow works seamlessly with other Dapr building blocks, such as service invocation, pub/sub, state management, and bindings.

The durable, resilient Dapr Workflow capability:

• Offers a built-in workflow runtime for driving Dapr Workflow execution.
• Provides SDKs for authoring workflows in code, using any language.
• Provides HTTP and gRPC APIs for managing workflows (start, query, pause/resume, raise event, terminate, purge).

Some example scenarios that Dapr Workflow can perform are:

• Order processing involving orchestration between inventory management, payment systems, and shipping services.
• HR onboarding workflows coordinating tasks across multiple departments and participants.
• Orchestrating the roll-out of digital menu updates in a national restaurant chain.
• Image processing workflows involving API-based classification and storage.

Features

Workflows and activities

With Dapr Workflow, you can write activities and then orchestrate those activities in a workflow. Workflow activities are:

• The basic unit of work in a workflow
• Used for calling other (Dapr) services, interacting with state stores, and pub/sub brokers.
• Used for calling external third party services.

Learn more about workflow activities.

Child workflows

In addition to activities, you can write workflows to schedule other workflows as child workflows. A child workflow has its own instance ID, history, and status that is independent of the parent workflow that started it, except for the fact that terminating the parent workflow terminates all of the child workflows created by it. Child workflow also supports automatic retry policies.

Learn more about child workflows.

Multi-application workflows

Multi-application workflows, enable you to orchestrate complex business processes that span across multiple applications. This allows a workflow to call activities or start child workflows in different applications, distributing the workflow execution while maintaining the security, reliability and durability guarantees of Dapr’s workflow engine.

Learn more about multi-application workflows.

History signing

When mTLS and the WorkflowHistorySigning feature flag are enabled, Dapr cryptographically signs every workflow history event using the sidecar’s X.509 SPIFFE identity. On each load, the full signature chain is verified, detecting any tampering of workflow state in the state store.

For example, consider an order-processing workflow that captures payment, ships the goods, and emails a receipt. Without signing, an attacker with write access to the state store could rewrite the recorded order total between the payment step and the shipping step, so the workflow ships at a lower price than was actually charged, and Dapr would have no way to know. With signing enabled, the modified event no longer matches its signature, the next load fails verification, and Dapr marks the workflow as FAILED with error type DAPR_WORKFLOW_HISTORY_TAMPERED instead of acting on the forged data. The same protection applies to approvals being flipped from denied to approved, extra recipients being added to outbound messages, or fake activity results being injected into the inbox.

Signing is a one-way commitment: once enabled for a workflow, it cannot be disabled.

Learn more about workflow history signing.

Timers and reminders

Same as Dapr actors, you can schedule reminder-like durable delays for any time range.

Learn more about workflow timers and reminders

History propagation

Workflow history propagation enables a current workflow to look back over the set of events that the workflow or a another workflow has executed and verify these actually occurred. Scenarios include fraud checks, checking compliance gates (was this activity called or not), or enabling long-running AI agents/workflows to maintain context across calls (multi-agent, multi-app workflows) to determine what the agent or workflows claims to have done, it actually true.

A parent workflow can opt to share its execution history with child workflows and activities — useful for chain-of-custody verification, fraud detection, audit, and AI-agent context that must flow across hops.

For details, read [workflow history propagation ](https://v1-18.docs.dapr.io/developing-applications/building-blocks/workflow/workflow-history-propagation/ to understand how to apply this to a workflow, child workflow and activities.

Learn more about workflow history propagation.

Workflow HTTP calls to manage a workflow

When you create an application with workflow code and run it with Dapr, you can call specific workflows that reside in the application. Each individual workflow can be:

• Started or terminated through a POST request
• Triggered to deliver a named event through a POST request
• Paused and then resumed through a POST request
• Purged from your state store through a POST request
• Queried for workflow status through a GET request

Learn more about how manage a workflow using HTTP calls.

Workflow patterns

Dapr Workflow simplifies complex, stateful coordination requirements in microservice architectures. The following sections describe several application patterns that can benefit from Dapr Workflow.

Learn more about different types of workflow patterns

Workflow SDKs

The Dapr Workflow authoring SDKs are language-specific SDKs that contain types and functions to implement workflow logic. The workflow logic lives in your application and is orchestrated by the Dapr Workflow engine running in the Dapr sidecar via a gRPC stream.

Supported SDKs

You can use the following SDKs to author a workflow.

Try out workflows

Quickstarts and tutorials

Want to put workflows to the test? Walk through the following quickstart and tutorials to see workflows in action:

Start using workflows directly in your app

Want to skip the quickstarts? Not a problem. You can try out the workflow building block directly in your application. After Dapr is installed, you can begin using workflows, starting with how to author a workflow.

Managing Workflows

Dapr provides comprehensive workflow management capabilities through both the HTTP API and the CLI.

Workflow Lifecycle Operations

Start Workflows

dapr workflow run MyWorkflow --app-id myapp --input '{"key": "value"}'

Monitor Workflows

# List active workflows for a given application
dapr workflow list --app-id myapp --filter-status RUNNING

# View execution history
dapr workflow history <instance-id> --app-id myapp

Control Workflows

# Suspend, resume, or terminate
dapr workflow suspend <instance-id> --app-id myapp
dapr workflow resume <instance-id> --app-id myapp
dapr workflow terminate <instance-id> --app-id myapp

Maintenance Operations

# Purge completed workflows
dapr workflow purge --app-id myapp --all-older-than 720h

See How-To: Manage workflows for detailed instructions.

Limitations

• State stores: You can only use state stores which support workflows, as described here.
• Azure Cosmos DB has payload and workflow complexity limitations.
• AWS DynamoDB has workflow complexity limitations.

Workflow security

Dapr provides fine-grained access control for workflow and activity scheduling through the WorkflowAccessPolicy resource. You can restrict which applications are permitted to start specific workflows or call specific activities on your application.

Workflow access policies for a given application (appID) are loaded by the sidecar when the application is instantiated, and are hot-reloaded thereafter when policies are added, updated, or removed. Policies are a pure allow-list evaluated on the callee side: a cross-app schedule is permitted only if some rule in some loaded policy matches the caller and the workflow or activity name.

This is especially important for multi-application workflows, where activities and child workflows execute across application boundaries. Read How-To: Apply workflow access policies for full configuration details.

Watch the demo

Watch this video for an overview on Dapr Workflow:

Next steps

Related links

• Workflow API reference
• Try out the full SDK examples:
  • Python example
  • JavaScript example
  • .NET example
  • Java example
  • Go example