Pipelines

Serverless pipelines, cron jobs, and background work

Model serverless pipelines for cron jobs, webhook-triggered workflows, and multi-step background jobs—staged work, retries, and fan-out while reusing the same functions as your live HTTP API.

How it works

How serverless pipelines work

Define steps

Pick functions as pipeline steps. Configure inputs, outputs, and dependencies between them.

Connect and schedule

Link steps into a DAG or sequential chain. Add cron triggers or webhook listeners to start runs automatically.

Monitor in real time

Watch each step's status, logs, and output live. Replay failed steps without re-running the whole pipeline.

Features

Built for real workflows

DAG execution

Steps run in parallel when dependencies allow. Full dependency resolution out of the box.

Webhook triggers

Trigger a pipeline via API or UI and pass structured payload data to the first step.

Manual approval

Pause execution and require a human sign-off before proceeding to the next step.

Cron scheduling

Run pipelines on a cron schedule — daily reports, batch jobs, cleanup tasks.

Pipelines reuse the same functions you expose through the gateway.

Decision guide

Pipelines vs direct functions vs async jobs

Use pipelines

When cron jobs, webhook-triggered workflows, or background jobs need retries, branching, fan-out, or staged orchestration across functions.

Use direct functions

When one HTTP request can finish quickly in a single gateway handler without cron, webhooks, or multi-step state.

Use async jobs

When callers should return immediately and you only need a queued background job—not a full DAG across many steps.

Example

DAG pipeline (manual trigger)

customer-support-pipeline.json

{
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "nodes": [
    { "id": "t1", "kind": "manualTrigger", "name": "Start", "position": { "x": 0, "y": 0 }, "config": {} },
    { "id": "n1", "kind": "lambda", "name": "Classify intent", "position": { "x": 240, "y": 0 }, "config": { "functionId": "intent-classifier", "onError": "failPipeline" } },
    { "id": "n2", "kind": "lambda", "name": "Billing agent", "position": { "x": 480, "y": 0 }, "config": { "functionId": "billing-agent", "onError": "failPipeline" } },
    { "id": "r1", "kind": "respond", "name": "Done", "position": { "x": 720, "y": 0 }, "config": { "statusCode": 200, "bodyMapping": { "ok": true } } }
  ],
  "edges": [
    { "id": "e1", "sourceNodeId": "t1", "targetNodeId": "n1" },
    { "id": "e2", "sourceNodeId": "n1", "targetNodeId": "n2", "sourceHandle": "success" },
    { "id": "e3", "sourceNodeId": "n2", "targetNodeId": "r1", "sourceHandle": "success" }
  ]
}

Sequential example (nightly processing)

nightly-sequential-pipeline.json

{
  "executionMode": "sequential",
  "trigger": { "type": "schedule", "cron": "0 2 * * *" },
  "steps": [
    { "id": "extract", "functionId": "nightly-extract" },
    { "id": "transform", "functionId": "nightly-transform", "dependsOn": ["extract"] },
    { "id": "publish", "functionId": "nightly-publish", "dependsOn": ["transform"] }
  ]
}

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