Connectors

Preview

This feature is covered by the Pre-GA Offerings Terms of the Google Cloud Platform Terms of Service. Pre-GA features may have limited support, and changes to pre-GA features may not be compatible with other pre-GA versions. For more information, see the launch stage descriptions.

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. For workflow samples that demonstrate how to use a connector, see Connectors Samples.

Connectors can be used to connect to other Google Cloud APIs within a workflow, helping you integrate your workflows with other 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.

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 Making authenticated requests from within a workflow.

Behavior during retries and long-running operations

Connectors have built-in behavior for handling retries and long-running operations.

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.

• Calls time out after 30 minutes.

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.

• Calls time out after 30 minutes.

• Connectors poll long-running operations periodically. 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.

• When an error occurs during a long-running operation, Workflows raises an OperationError error. The error includes an additional attribute, error, which contains operation-specific details.

Firestore

The Firestore connector allows you to connect to the Firestore APIs from within a workflow.

The Firestore connector only supports databases created in Native Mode. Operations will fail if used on a database in Datastore Mode. To learn more about the difference between Native Mode and Datastore Mode,see Choosing between Native mode and Datastore mode.

Warning: Once a user has written to a Datastore or Firestore database, they can no longer update the database mode. If you require a mode change in this situation, reach out to Firestore Support.