Use Case · Operations

Approval workflow on the Software Lifecycle Cloud

Approval workflows on KERNSTACK make “someone must sign this before it continues” a step type: a workflow runs functions and workers until it reaches a human step with a title — approve this invoice, accept this clause, release this payment — and pauses there with the record attached. The decision, the decider, and the moment are stored in the run, so the approval is evidence, not an email that says “ok”.

Approval WorkflowsNoSQL TablesCollaboration BoardFunctions (WASM)
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The engineering bottleneck with assembled stacks

Finance and legal reviewers must sign a step before it continues, and the signature currently lives in email threads, chat reactions, and a shared drive of PDFs named final. The work waits invisibly — nobody can list what is awaiting whom — and when an auditor asks who approved an exception, the answer requires a volunteer with a good memory and a searchable inbox.

Architecture on the Software Lifecycle Cloud

The workflow declares the path: extraction or computation steps first, then the human step, then whatever the approval unlocks — payment release, publication, shipment. Approvers see a queue of titled tasks with the underlying record one click deep; their decision resumes the run with the outcome as data the next steps can branch on. Timeouts and reminders are part of the declaration, so a three-day-old approval nags its owner automatically.

The queue is the management tool

Once approvals are steps, they are countable: median wait per approver, oldest open item, which step type stalls every Friday. That visibility — free, from run data — is what changes behaviour. Bottlenecks stop being personalities and become a chart the team can fix by adding an alternate approver, declared in the same workflow.

  • Every decision carries approver, timestamp, and the record as shown — audit-grade by default
  • Branches on outcome are declared: reject returns the item with the reason attached, not a new email thread
  • Ageing approvals remind their owners on schedule; escalation is a step, not a hope

Approval is not a rubber stamp dispenser

What the step shows the approver decides whether the control is real: the invoice beside its extraction, the clause beside the playbook deviation. The workflow’s job is assembling that context; a workflow that shows a bare “approve?” button has automated the theatre and kept the risk.

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

As titled tasks from the workflows waiting on them, each opening onto the record being decided. The board view ages them visibly, and reminders fire on the workflow’s schedule until a decision lands.

Yes. Human steps support changes-requested outcomes: the item returns to a named earlier step with the reviewer’s feedback, attempts counted. The loop is part of the run history, so “approved on the third try” is visible forever.

The workflow can declare alternates and expiry behaviour — after a set time the step escalates or reassigns. Absence handling is a declaration reviewed by the team, not a colleague’s favour.

Connected in the Project Graph

Related capabilities, architectures, and comparisons

Category PillarThe Software Lifecycle CloudWhy people and agents build, deploy, and operate on a single vertically integrated stack.Service · OrchestrationWorkflowsDurable workflows with human pausesService · DataTablesServerless key-value and document tablesService · PeopleCollaborationBoards and conversations on the projectService · ComputeFunctionsGo WebAssembly HTTP handlersIndustry SolutionLogistics Cloud SolutionsLogistics products on KERNSTACK give every shipment one timeline and every exception an owner: carrier scans and status callbacks are stored raw, normalised into canonical states per shipment, reconciled against orders by workers, and surfaced — to dispatchers as an exception queue, to customers as a tracking page reading the very same rows. The fog between “the carrier says” and “our system says” is where this architecture earns its keep.Use Case · ProductExperiment assignmentAssignment is a pure function of the subject key and the experiment’s salt — stable across requests, no coordination needed. The function records the assignment row once and serves the variant; outcome handlers were already writing events, which now simply carry the experiment id the assignment returned. Analysis reads assignments and outcomes from neighbouring tables with the same keys.Use Case · AgenciesAgency client deliveryThe studio’s delivery shape is a template stack.json: gateway, functions or workers in the client’s stack languages, tables, buckets, and apps under one target per client, on European infrastructure the studio can name in the pitch. Previews run the same declaration; the client’s approval happens in the bound conversation with a live link. Every client’s meter is separate by construction — the studio sees delivery cost per client without allocation spreadsheets.

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