Long-running workflow
An automation that takes minutes, hours, or days to complete waiting for human actions, external approvals, or scheduled events between steps. Requires persistent state management and careful handling of timeouts and failures.
Expert insight
A long-running workflow (spanning hours or days, like a multi-step onboarding sequence) needs to survive the automation platform restarting or redeploying mid-execution, workflows built assuming they'll run start-to-finish in one uninterrupted session break in ways that only show up once something in the underlying infrastructure needs to restart.
In a real workflow
An onboarding workflow waits days for a signed contract, then continues with setup steps.
Common mistakes
- Workflows that hold resources while waiting.
- Losing state on restarts.
Complexity level
Technical term used in production automation systems.
Related terms
State management
Tracking where a workflow is in its execution and what data has been processed. …
Async / Asynchronous processing
When an automation queues a task and continues without waiting for it to complet…
Wait / delay node
A workflow step that pauses execution for a defined period or until a condition …
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Modular design
Building workflows from small, reusable components rather than monolit…
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The ability to understand what is happening inside an automation syste…
Pipe (Unix)
A mechanism that connects the output of one process directly to the in…
Queue consumer
A worker process that reads from a queue and processes each job. In n8…
Rate limit backpressure
Slowing down the producer of a workflow (e.g., a data import) when the…
Reusability
Designing workflow components that can be used across multiple automat…
Go deeper
Guides that cover Long-running workflow