Frequently asked questions

What are the Use Cases

It is all about saving people time through automating repetitive or low value Tasks and increasing your productivity.

• Employee Onboarding - Send, track, and automatically action access requests for new employees
• Git Bot - Manage issue and PR responses and categorizations
• Report Generation - Integrate and collate data from multiple sources into a cohesive scorecard
• Incident Management - Help resolve issues with automatic routing and acknowledgement
• Operations - Implement runbook automation and issue remediation
• Syncing Systems - Send data between systems as events happen to ensure tools and access stay in sync

What are Tasks and Workflows?

• Tasks are a discrete piece of work .e.g. making a HTTP request. They are the base unit of execution in Flow.
• Workflows are a series of Tasks connected together.
• Workflows form and are executed as a directed acyclic graph (DAG).

Tasks

Tasks can be split into three distinct types. See Getting To Know Tasks for more information.

• System Tasks: are logic based Tasks that influence the DAG.
• Template Tasks: are Tasks that perform a function and can be verified out-of-the box, are community-provided, and managed through Task Manager (in the Admin interface).
• Custom Task: a custom Task allows a bring-your-own container to run in place of a Task and executes any custom logic.

How long does a Workflow take to execute?

A Workflow can take any amount of time. A Workflow generally starts executing a Task within three seconds. A simple Workflow with a single Task usually takes less then 15 seconds end-to-end.

Does enabling the Workflow option for persistent storage have a performance impact?

Enabling the Workflow option for persistent storage results in a small performance impact, as the system works behind the scenes to spin up storage prior to executing any Tasks on the Workflow.

In tests, this has taken from 5 - 10 seconds of additional time.

Are there any time limits defined or that can be set?

Yes, time limits are defined as part of the team quotas set by the team owner or administrator.

Can I create my own Tasks?

Yes. There are two ways this can be done

1. You can bring your own containers and run them through the use of the Custom Task in the Workflow Editor.
2. You can define a Team Task and use that in your Workflow. These Tasks can also be imported from the Tekton Task Hub.

What is a DAG?

• The core concept of Flow. It is how we represent Tasks and their relationships and dependencies that determine how a Workflow executes.
• It's a graph. Think vertices and edges between them.
• It's directed. Edges between vertices have an orientation or direction.
• It's acyclic. You can't end end up where you started in an execution.
• DAGs have a number of applications across a number of disciplines. For our purposes, it is used for scheduling the Tasks in a Workflow.
• Learn some more about graph theory and DAGs via Wikipedia.