Support for scheduled, recurring flows
October 15, 2025 | Ada Nikolaidis | Brigitte Raumann
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.
Users often want to run flows on a regular schedule, such as nightly or hourly. This is now possible using Globus Timers. As with transfers, you can schedule flows to run at a later date as well as on a recurring interval. Scheduling a flow run with Timers offers the advantages of an always-on managed service that monitors and records the status of your transfer tasks and flow runs, and as the owner of a timer, you can be notified when your timer needs intervention to continue (such as reauthentication).
Using the combination of Timers and Flows, you can:
- Perform a nightly tar and transfer of your data to a tape archive.
- Schedule a weekly clean up of your scratch or temporary space.
- Move and process batches of image data hourly for the duration of your experiment.
- Routinely extract and publish metadata from newly collected datasets and publish to your data portal.
Users are already using Timers to schedule flows to accelerate and automate research activities. In the case of a climate study, a timer periodically ran a flow that moved ephemeral data from distributed sensors to computing resources and then aggregated and published the data. In an epidemiological use case, a recurring flow pulled data nightly from a variety of public sources and then processed the data to calculate surveillance indicators, such as pathogen concentrations in waste water.
In order to provide enhanced support for running flows, Timers now monitors and reports the status of each flow run or transfer task until completion. This gives users better visibility into the state of their scheduled flow runs and transfer tasks and allows users to resume a flow if it becomes inactive.
Setting up your flow timer is as easy as scheduling a recurring meeting using the guided input in the Globus Web app. You can also start your flow timer using the Globus CLI.
Learn more about this feature on the Globus docs site.