Skip to main content

Connecting Flows via Events

Real-world production systems are not islands. They are often tightly connected to their surrounding environment, reacting to changes in real time. Using the event triggering pattern described in this section, you can make Metaflow flows start automatically based on external events. Or, you can connect multiple flows together, via events, to build arbitrarily complex systems by using workflows as building blocks.

Event triggering is an alternative to time-based scheduling using the @schedule decorator. Instead of flows starting at a specific date and time, they are triggered when a particular event is sent to a production orchestrator. This diagram illustrates the concept:

  1. External systems like data warehouses, ETL pipelines, or microservices can create special events which trigger executions of flows deployed on a production orchestrator.

  2. Deployed flows can also trigger other flows automatically. In this case, SecondFlow is configured to start automatically when FirstFlow finishes.

Events define a clear interface between workflows, which can be developed and operated independently, allowing multiple people to collaborate without friction when building and operating a larger system. For more context about event triggering, see the announcement blog post.

Get started with event triggering by reading the next three sections. The fourth section is relevant for more advanced use cases that leverage the @project decorator to deploy multiple concurrent variants of event-triggered flows.

  1. Triggering flows based on external events
  2. Triggering flows based on other flows
  3. Inspecting events
  4. Deploying variants of event-triggered flows
info

As of today, event triggering is only supported on Argo Workflows. Let us know on Metaflow community Slack if you would like to see other production orchestrators supported as well.