Home Depot Orchestrates Self-Service Cloud with Workflows

Utilise a unified platform that orchestrates workflows to empower клієнти to deploy resources in minutes, not days, and to submit a Right. Consider it done. with confidence.

The solution stitches a series з services across cloud, data, and automation, so teams can focus on the most цінний work while the platform governs governance and compliance.

For клієнти, the architecture scales across generations of deployments, delivering the most consistent experience whilst freeing engineers to work on new features and shorten time to value.

The stack leans on Google's infrastructure and cloud-native patterns to ensure low latency and reliability, enabling a platform that can be consumed as a service by internal teams and external customers.

With a focus on self-service, the approach eliminates redundant steps, reduces toil, and feeds rapid feedback loops that improve offerings across stores, apps and devices.

In practice, Home Depot demonstrates how to scale infrastructure across a centralised platform, orchestrate workflows, and deliver a free self-service model that generates tangible value for клієнти.

Practical blueprint for enabling self-service cloud orchestration with FLOW workflows

Publish a catalogue of common subworkflows as ready-to-run templates in FLOW, allowing customers to deploy infrastructure, services and configurations in their own time.

Design modular subworkflows for generations of workloads. Each subworkflow exposes stable inputs, outputs, and policy checks, so developers can compose new services quickly without rewriting boilerplate. Each piece remains powerful and composable, accelerating development and saving resources and time, reducing writing boilerplate.

Establish a governance framework that enforces access, cost controls, and security from the start. Implement policy-as-code and automated tests so teams validate outcomes before going live. A Google-inspired search across templates helps developers discover the most valuable building blocks, speeding onboarding for customers.

Structure the catalogue around infrastructure primitives and services, not just machines. Document common patterns for reliability and scalability, and tie success to clear metrics. Focus resources on the most valuable workflows, allowing teams to shift time from manual provisioning to building new capabilities. This approach delivers results faster than traditional writing and scripting. In home contexts, streamline provisioning; in retail, enforce consistency and compliance. Benefits include faster time-to-value and fewer outages, improving customer satisfaction.

Define a reusable self-service catalogue for IT, store teams, and partners

Publish a single, reusable catalogue of self-service items and expose it via a one-click request surface across IT, store teams and partners. Start by converting the most frequent tasks into subworkflows and link them to a scalable platform that supports customisation without code changes.

Organise the catalogue around three domains: IT operations, retail store ops, and partner programmes. Each item references a set of resources, depots, applications and software, with clear inputs, outputs, SLAs and cost indicators. Use a Google search across time, platform, resource type and ownership to surface the most relevant options. Catalogue items map to their owners and their budgets to enforce responsibility.

Key design principles ensure the most value: canonical subworkflows, versioned templates, and a lightweight development loop that keeps thds libraries current. The platform should be powerful enough to compose custom requests whilst allowing governance and offering solutions that scale.

• Subworkflows cover the most common tasks: provision a VM, assign a user, deploy software, provision store devices, create data access, and onboard a partner.
• Each catalogue item enumerates resources, depots, applications and software with a standard input model, pre-approved approvals and a defined time to fulfil.
• Templates and thds libraries support rapid development, reducing time to value across their teams.
• Access governance uses RBAC, policy checks, and automated approvals for low-risk requests, with escalation paths for higher risk, allowing developers and store teams to move fast without compromising security.
• Analytics track time to fulfil, most requested items, and benefits such as labour hours saved and reduced incident tickets.

This catalogue, for home retailers, accelerates in-store service and supports omnichannel workflows.

Templates and thds libraries support rapid development, enabling custom configurations while maintaining governance. This approach is allowing development teams to prototype quickly and iterate with feedback. Each pattern becomes a repeatable solution that can be combined with other subworkflows to cover more scenarios.

1. Inventory and categorise existing requests from IT, retail teams, and partners to identify the 80/20 set of subworkflows.
2. Design canonical subworkflows with defined inputs, outputs, and error handling, then package them as reusable components.
3. Build the catalogue with linked resources, depots, and applications, plus a go‑to-market plan for internal teams and external partners.
4. Integrate the catalogue into the request flow, providing a single surface for all three domains and enabling one-click or guided-assisted fulfilment.
5. Pilot with a representative group of stores and partner registries, monitor time to fulfil and user satisfaction, and iterate in 4‑week sprints.

Examples of concrete catalogue items include: VM provisioning, software licence activation, access requests to retail data stores, device provisioning for stores, partner onboarding packs, and content publishing workflows. Each item links to a subset of resources, depots, and applications, enabling most requests to resolve in minutes rather than days.

Benefits accrue quickly: developers gain a consistent, reusable toolkit; store teams reduce handoffs and time to deploy new capabilities; partners gain predictable onboarding timelines. By cataloguing resources and offering powerful yet controlled customisation, Home has a clear path to measurable time savings across departments and time zones.

Design FLOW-powered provisioning and deprovisioning workflows across environments

Build a FLOW-powered blueprint that can compose provisioning and deprovisioning as repeatable subworkflows, stored in depots for their versioned reuse across environments. The engine orchestrates resource, service, and application actions across dev, test, staging, and prod, delivering consistent outcomes in a retail context for Home Depot. Focus on idempotent steps, time-to-value, and rollback safety to protect their systems whilst enabling teams to deploy rapidly. This approach delivers a Powerful pattern for scaling provisioning across environments.

Define a resource catalogue that spans compute, storage, databases, queues, networking, identity, and observability. Map each resource to its environment and to a service owner. Use tech debt items to track technical debt items and schedule remediation within the flow, so that deprovisioning not only frees capacity but also clears lingering configurations. The subworkflows should include ProvisionResource, BindIdentity, AttachPolicies, ConfigureNetwork, DeployApplications, and ValidateFunctionalities, with corresponding deprovisioning subworkflows that reverse these actions in a safe, idempotent order. It also paves the way for scalable solutions that teams can reuse across depots and projects.

Design the composition: create a base flow that is environment-agnostic, then compose environment-specific subworkflows that handle credentials, region-specific settings and data-migration constraints. This approach allows you to run provisioning across environments in parallel where possible, whilst preserving dependencies such as database migrations or service mesh updates. Use the depots to store the compiled pipelines and enable their free reuse by teams across business units.

Operational metrics and governance: measure time-to-provision and time-to-deprovision per workflow, target the 95th percentile to stay under 6 minutes for a typical multi-resource app, and maintain a failure rate under 0.5%. Implement continuous validation steps and automated rollback paths. Provide dashboards that show resource status, services health, and cross-environment drift to keep their systems aligned with policy and customer commitments, especially in retail workloads where peak time aligns with promotions.

Time-saving patterns: enable cross-environment workflows that run concurrently for independent resources, while sequentially handling critical sequences (like database migrations) to ensure consistency. Use subworkflows to isolate functionalities and reuse across teams, enabling applications to be provisioned with their dependencies in minutes rather than hours. The result is a self-service model that is fully automated, reduces manual toil, and frees engineers to focus on higher-value work.

Enforce security, governance, and access controls within self-service requests

Adopt policy-as-code and RBAC to enforce security, governance, and access controls within every self-service request. That policy layer is a managed, scalable set of solutions that accelerates safe provisioning across teams and their customers.

Create a bespoke policy catalogue that documents who can request what, across their resources, under which conditions, and which resources are in scope; implement this catalogue as code that the engine evaluates upon each request and stores decisions in documentation.

The platform that orchestrates this flow should expose a series of gates: authentication, authorisation, and scope checks, with automated denial or approval actions and technical controls. Use managed controls to enforce least-privilege access and ensure every request passes a traceable approval trail across the workflow, so thds development teams can audit behaviour in thds documentation and customers can see transparent governance. Move away from ad-hoc reviews; these checks run automatically and produce a clear result for the requester.

Implementation should enable a single engine to evaluate policy definitions, constraints, and resource scopes, then compose the final decision and apply it to the requested resource set. The documentation layer captures decisions, timestamps, actor identity, and the rationale, turning security into a reusable solution for development and operations teams. Across environments, enforce time-bound access, auditable logs, and cross-resource controls, so customers gain valuable benefits without slowing work. Offer free starter templates for common request types, with ready-made governance rules that customers can customise.

Track cost, usage and performance with live FLOW dashboards

Enable live FLOW dashboards across all depots and home resources to see cost, usage, and performance in real time, enabling faster decisions than static reports.

Link data sources to the dashboards using custom connectors and documentation to ensure data integrity. This approach balances cost visibility with resource usage, supporting developers as they create new solutions while maintaining clear visibility into their applications and services.

Set clear thresholds and alerts: trigger notifications for cost drift, unusual usage by series, or latency spikes, allowing teams to respond before issues impact users. Use batch and streaming data to maintain up-to-date visuals, and configure role-based access so stakeholders see the right level of detail without clutter.

Google's documentation and internal engine best practices guide the setup, ensuring that their development teams have accurate dashboards that reflect real-world workloads. This alignment helps teams build and iterate on custom applications and services, tracking the benefits of changes across resources and depots in a single, coherent view.

Onboard developers and vendors through guided, auditable workflows

Deploy guided, auditable onboarding workflows as the default path for developers and vendors, with a 60-minute self-service setup that validates identity, assigns least-privilege access, and activates the required tools upon kickoff.

Focus on a library of custom, reusable steps that they can compose into role-specific journeys – from sign-off to provisioning – so teams access the most essential functionalities quickly.

Upon completion, lock an auditable trail that records who approved each action, when it happened, and under which policy. This documentation enables traceability and regulatory compliance across generations of vendors and internal teams.

Benefits include faster onboarding, reduced risk exposure, and stronger alignment across code depots and cloud accounts, enabling рішення that scale with demand.

Time spent on repetitive checks drops, freeing up time for engineers to focus on writing high-impact features. This approach delivers valuable outcomes and benefits, whilst keeping the process Here's the translation: Right, here's the translation: and predictable.

Implementation blueprint: map access roles, write clear policy documentation, and rely on a managed engine that orchestrates workflows across depots, code repositories, and CI/CD gates. This architecture ensures consistent enforcement and enables Rapid onboarding across teams.

Establish KPIs: time-to-onboard, approval cycle length, and workflow reuse rate; monitor across teams, and generations, then optimise with dashboards and quarterly reviews. This data-driven approach keeps onboarding повністю aligned with governance needs and business goals.