Workflows in AWS and GCP — Tim Bray

Tim Bray is probably one of the most authoritative people there are to write on the new Google Cloud Workflows. He designed much of AWS Step Functions after all. This is a good overview and highlights some of the key differences.

While I haven’t been to the mat with GCP to do real work, at the moment I think the AWS approach is a winner here. First of all, I’ve hated global variables — for good reason — since before most people reading this were born. Second, YAML is a lousy programming language to do arithmetic and so on in.

Third, and most important, what happens when you want to do seriously concurrent processing, which I think is a really common workflow scenario? GCP doesn’t really have parallelism built-in yet, but I bet that’ll change assuming the product gets any traction. The combination of un-typed un-scoped global variables with parallel processing is a fast-track to concurrency hell.

Overall, it’s just good that Google has added workflows to GCP as it is a critical core service for any cloud provider.