Workflows

Workflows brings durable, multi-step execution to Workers: define steps, and the platform handles retries, sleeping for days, and resuming from failure with each step’s result persisted. The programming model is genuinely nice — it turns gnarly orchestration code full of queues and cron checks into a readable function.

In practice it has been solid. Steps retry the way the docs say, sleeps measured in days resume on time, failures pick up where they left off, and the observability has matured to where debugging a misbehaving workflow is actually reasonable. Provisioning sequences, payment flows, long-running jobs with human-scale waits — the shapes it targets, it handles dependably.

The quiet irony is what earns it the score: Workflows is built on Durable Objects, and it’s the reliable way to consume them. All the DO-grade coordination and persistence, packaged behind a primitive that behaves predictably and never hands you an input-gate deadlock or a lost object at 3am. If a design is tempting you toward raw Durable Objects, reach for Workflows first. Two points held back only for youth and fit: the tooling is still growing, and it’s not the answer for high-frequency, low-latency coordination — it’s a batch-and-steps tool, and it should stay one.