# Workflows are coming to Supabase

[Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase) · Francesco Ceccon · Apr 2, 2021

**Type:** Announcement

## Summary

Supabase is developing Workflows, an Elixir-based orchestration engine designed to coordinate complex serverless tasks and event-driven logic. Standard serverless and database-triggered functions often struggle with delayed execution and queuing without external cron processes. To solve this with native Postgres integration, the new engine adopts the open-source Amazon States Language specification to orchestrate functions across platforms including AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenFaaS, and Postgres itself. Execution states, jobs, queues, and logs are deeply integrated with Postgres using the Oban job processing library, though transient in-memory workers are also supported. The engine responds directly to HTTP calls or database change events delivered through Supabase Realtime.

## Context

Standard function providers and database-triggered functions lack built-in queuing and scheduling capabilities for delayed actions without relying on self-managed cron jobs. Furthermore, existing open-source workflow tools lack deep integration with Postgres.

## Approach / What changed

Supabase is building an open-source Elixir orchestration engine that interprets Amazon States Language. It coordinates functions across cloud providers and Postgres, utilizing Oban for Postgres-backed queues, jobs, and state storage, with support for persistent and transient execution.

## Takeaways

- Supabase Workflows uses the open-source Amazon States Language to define state transitions and coordinate functions across external providers and Postgres without running code itself.
- Workflows support both default persistent mode, which relies on Postgres and Oban to survive server restarts, and transient mode for high-frequency in-memory execution.
- Workflows can be triggered by direct HTTP calls or database events like inserts, allowing state constructs like Map and Choice to process batch event payloads.

**Tags:** [Architecture](https://yomu.fyi/topic/architecture), [Open Source](https://yomu.fyi/topic/open-source), [Postgres](https://yomu.fyi/topic/postgres), [Serverless](https://yomu.fyi/topic/serverless)

[Read original post](https://supabase.com/blog/supabase-workflows)