Globus Flows

Globus Flows provides secure, managed automation of complex workflows at scale. These automations, called flows, are series of actions that can perform common chores—like replicating data across multiple storage systems—as well as complex, bespoke workflows—such as managing multiple conditional data analysis and results distribution operations.

The Globus Flows overview provides an introduction to the key components of this service.

Getting Started

The best way to start using Globus Flows is to run a flow.

Globus offers some flows that you can use right away:

  • The Move (Copy and Delete) flow copies data between collections then deletes the original data from the source collection.

  • The Two-Stage Transfer flow copies data between two collections using a third collection as an intermediate location—which can be useful for meeting security and compliance requirements.

To learn more about how to run and manage flows, check out the Getting Started guide, which provides step-by-step instructions for using the Globus Web App to start and monitor runs.

To get started authoring your own flows, see the Authoring Flows guide which describes the essential components of a flow definition and provides information about advanced functionality like expression evaluation, exception handling, and more. In order to describe and control the user input that can be provided when starting a flow, see the Authoring Input Schemas guide. Adding an input schema to your flow also allows the Globus Web App to provide an easy-to-use form that can be used to start new runs of your flow.

Globus provides many actions that you can use to interact with Globus services or provide other useful functionality in your flow (for instance, sending custom email notifications or providing an interactive form to allow human interaction during a flow run). To browse these actions and learn how to use them in your flows, see the Globus Hosted Action Providers directory.

Advanced Integrations

In addition to Globus-hosted action providers, you can create your own action providers to incorporate other applications and capabilities into flows. For example, if you have developed a service to perform a domain-specific analysis, you can create an action provider that allows you and others to apply that analysis as an action in a Globus flow.

Globus Action Provider Tools provide a Python library for implementing custom action providers for use in Globus Flows.

It is also possible to trigger the start of a flow based on file system events. We provide some examples of starting runs automatically to help you get started.

CLI, SDK, and APIs

We provide a Python SDK and a command line interface as part of our client tools for use with Globus Flows and the action provider API.

Mailing List

Release updates, feature announcements, and discussions for all Globus services take place on the Globus Discuss mailing list: discuss@globus.org

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If you have any questions, please contact support@globus.org.