Flows support for Registered APIs released

[Ada Nikolaidis]

Today we have released support for registering APIs directly with Globus Flows, making it simpler to integrate new types of tasks into your Globus Flows automations. Now Flows can call registered APIs without requiring a hosted intermediary action provider.

Globus subscribers can easily register existing APIs, even APIs they do not own, with the new Globus Registered API CLI. In order to be registered, an API must use Globus Auth for authentication (or be unauthenticated) and provide an OpenAPI schema. Roles can be assigned to Registered APIs to delegate management and control visibility. 

Once an API is registered with Flows, flow authors can use the registered API in their flow definitions. For example, one user has registered a Status API of an HPC system so that a flow can include steps to load-balance between two HPC job queues, reading both and then determining where to schedule new work, thus maximizing efficiency of the available compute resources.

As part of this release, Globus is also introducing a suite of registered APIs for the Groups and Search services. This makes new functionality available to your flows, including performing Search queries, managing roles on Search indices, managing Groups, and evaluating Groups membership. For example, management of group-based data access can be incorporated into a flow by including registered APIs for group membership. In another example, a flow can now query a Search index and use the results to determine if a data set already exists in the portal. To see all of the new registered APIs that are available, visit the Hosted Registered APIs pages on the Globus Docs site.

For more information about how to get started, visit the Registered APIs documentation at the Globus Docs site.

Ada Nikolaidis
Globus Software Engineering Manager
Globus.org | University of Chicago