Workflows are the backbone of any serious application. Whether you’re processing payments, onboarding users, or orchestrating complex business logic, you need a reliable way to coordinate multiple steps, handle failures, and ensure everything happens in the right order.
Traditional workflow engines like Temporal and Inngest are brilliant at this, but they come with a lot of overhead. Sailhouse takes a different approach - we’ve built workflow capabilities right into our event-driven architecture, giving you the power of complex orchestration without the complexity.
Most workflow engines require you to define your entire workflow upfront in a rigid structure. With Sailhouse, workflows emerge naturally from your event-driven architecture using primitives you already understand: topics, subscriptions, wait groups, and cron jobs.
This means:
The simplest workflows on Sailhouse are just a chain of events, but sometimes, you need a little more control and parallelism - so let’s dive into how you can achieve that.
Let’s walk through a real-world example: processing a new user signup. This workflow needs to:
Here’s how you’d build this with Sailhouse:
Each of these topics has its own subscription handling the specific logic. When all four steps complete, the user-onboarding-complete
event fires, which can trigger the follow-up sequence.
Real workflows aren’t linear. Sometimes you need different paths based on conditions, error handling, or user actions. Sailhouse handles this naturally through conditional event publishing.
Let’s extend our signup example to handle different user types:
One of the biggest advantages of Sailhouse workflows is built-in error handling. Since each step is an event, you get automatic retries, dead letter queues, and graceful failure handling without any extra configuration.
Some workflows span days, weeks, or even months. Think about a user onboarding sequence, subscription renewals, or compliance workflows. Sailhouse handles this brilliantly with scheduled events and cron jobs.
Many business processes require human approval. Traditional workflow engines make this cumbersome, but Sailhouse’s event-driven approach makes it natural.
If you’re running a microservices architecture, Sailhouse workflows excel at coordinating cross-service operations while maintaining service boundaries.
Each service only needs to know about its own topics, maintaining clean boundaries while participating in the larger workflow.
New to Sailhouse? Start here to get set up and send your first event.
Master the coordination primitive that powers parallel workflow execution.
Build time-based workflows with delays, timeouts, and scheduling.
Trigger workflows on a regular schedule with cron jobs.
Got questions about designing your workflows? We’d love to help - just drop us a line.
Workflows are the backbone of any serious application. Whether you’re processing payments, onboarding users, or orchestrating complex business logic, you need a reliable way to coordinate multiple steps, handle failures, and ensure everything happens in the right order.
Traditional workflow engines like Temporal and Inngest are brilliant at this, but they come with a lot of overhead. Sailhouse takes a different approach - we’ve built workflow capabilities right into our event-driven architecture, giving you the power of complex orchestration without the complexity.
Most workflow engines require you to define your entire workflow upfront in a rigid structure. With Sailhouse, workflows emerge naturally from your event-driven architecture using primitives you already understand: topics, subscriptions, wait groups, and cron jobs.
This means:
The simplest workflows on Sailhouse are just a chain of events, but sometimes, you need a little more control and parallelism - so let’s dive into how you can achieve that.
Let’s walk through a real-world example: processing a new user signup. This workflow needs to:
Here’s how you’d build this with Sailhouse:
Each of these topics has its own subscription handling the specific logic. When all four steps complete, the user-onboarding-complete
event fires, which can trigger the follow-up sequence.
Real workflows aren’t linear. Sometimes you need different paths based on conditions, error handling, or user actions. Sailhouse handles this naturally through conditional event publishing.
Let’s extend our signup example to handle different user types:
One of the biggest advantages of Sailhouse workflows is built-in error handling. Since each step is an event, you get automatic retries, dead letter queues, and graceful failure handling without any extra configuration.
Some workflows span days, weeks, or even months. Think about a user onboarding sequence, subscription renewals, or compliance workflows. Sailhouse handles this brilliantly with scheduled events and cron jobs.
Many business processes require human approval. Traditional workflow engines make this cumbersome, but Sailhouse’s event-driven approach makes it natural.
If you’re running a microservices architecture, Sailhouse workflows excel at coordinating cross-service operations while maintaining service boundaries.
Each service only needs to know about its own topics, maintaining clean boundaries while participating in the larger workflow.
New to Sailhouse? Start here to get set up and send your first event.
Master the coordination primitive that powers parallel workflow execution.
Build time-based workflows with delays, timeouts, and scheduling.
Trigger workflows on a regular schedule with cron jobs.
Got questions about designing your workflows? We’d love to help - just drop us a line.