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Self Service Workflows Overview

Service and Infrastructure onboarding in today’s world is slow, manual and tedious. Developers often spend days—or even weeks—setting up new software and completing Day-2 operations. This inefficiency arises from either waiting for ticket resolutions (TicketOps) or manually handling repetitive tasks, which results in a poor developer experience and decreased productivity.

Harness IDP addresses these challenges with Self-Service Workflows.

Workflows enable developer self-service by automating manual tasks and processes. Using Workflows, platform engineering teams can:

  • Automate new service onboarding.
  • Simplify Day 2 operations for developers.
  • Provide developers with golden paths to production that include guardrails and best practices.

Workflow Basics​

Let’s get started with the fundamental steps to understand, build, and configure a Workflow from scratch.

Get Started with Workflows​

Ready to start using Workflows? Follow our Quickstart Guide and create your first Workflow in just a few minutes.

  1. Register the Workflow using the workflow.yaml file configuration.
  2. Execute the Workflow by providing input details as defined in the configuration.
  3. Inputs are processed, backend actions are triggered, and orchestration pipelines execute tasks according to the Workflow logic.
  4. Outputs are generated as specified in the workflow.yaml configuration.

Understanding Workflow YAML​

Workflow is defined using a YAML configuration file, typically named workflow.yaml, which contains all the metadata required for the Workflow. This file is stored in the root directory of the source code repository in your connected Git provider.

Components of Workflow.yaml​

The workflow.yaml file is divided into three key components:

  1. Frontend: Defines the input fields required for the Workflow.
  2. Backend: Configures the actions to be triggered and the orchestration pipelines to be executed during the Workflow.
  3. Outputs: Specifies the output variables to be shown to developers after the execution.

Learn more about the Workflow YAML syntax here.

Configuring Workflows​

You can configure your workflow's frontend and backend by defining specific inputs, actions, and orchestration pipelines. Here’s how you can learn more about configuring your workflows:

Registering Workflows​

Once your workflow.yaml is ready, you can register a new workflow directly in Harness IDP. Refer to this detailed guide to learn how to create and manage your workflows seamlessly from Harness IDP.

Key Capabilities​

Harness IDP Workflows allow developers to focus on building features while platform engineers simplify complex processes and enforce standards. Backstage offers basic automation through its Scaffolder, which focuses on creating and registering new components in its Catalog.

Harness goes beyond this with comprehensive developer automation. Here’s how:

  • Harness Pipelines: A powerful YAML-based automation workflow engine derived from Harness’s CI/CD modules.
  • Prebuilt integrations: Connect seamlessly with tools like ServiceNow, Jira, Slack, and other DevOps solutions.
  • Version control: Manage Workflows and Pipelines in Git for easy collaboration and rollback.
  • Pipeline Studio: An intuitive visual interface for creating and editing Pipelines within Harness IDP.

For more details on what Harness IDP adds on top of Backstage software templates, please refer to the docs here.