Automation services
Accelerate development by using automation services that users can easily discover in Business Automation Studio and reuse in a consistent way in business applications (applications) and other business automations (automations).
An automation is a collection of artifacts that fulfills a business purpose. To make capabilities from your automations reusable, you publish them as automation services in Business Automation Studio where a business developer can easily discover and call them in a low-code, consistent way regardless of where the service originated from or its underlying technology.
You can also bring in assets that you developed in a traditional environment, such as IBM® Business Automation Workflow, and publish them as automation services for reuse.
There are two aspects to reusing automation services: providing an automation service by making it available for reuse in Business Automation Studio and consuming the automation service by calling it from another automation (for example, workflow) or application.
Providing automation services
To provide capabilities from an automation as a service, you expose the implementation as operations and publish an automation service in Business Automation Studio so that users can discover and call the operations from other automations or applications. The way you create and publish an automation service depends on the type of automation:
- Decision automation services
- You can publish decision automation services and use them in applications and workflows. To publish a decision service, you deploy the decision service archive that contains the decision service and then publish it in Business Automation Studio. For more information, see Building and deploying from Decision Designer and Publishing decision services as automation services.
- Workflow automation services
- You can publish workflow automation services and use them in applications and other workflows.
In Workflow Designer, you create exposed automation services as REST services and decide which operations they offer. You can implement the operations with existing service flows or create new ones. You then publish the automation service in Business Automation Studio. See Providing workflow automation services.
- External automation services
- You can reuse existing process applications from traditional Business Automation Workflow by importing them and creating the automation service in Business Automation Studio or you can create an external automation service from the services in an OpenAPI or Swagger file and choose the operations you want included to then publish as external automation services in Business Automation Studio. See External automation services and Publishing external automation services.
Consuming automation services
When these automation services are published, you can discover and call them from other automations, such as workflow automations, and applications. See Calling automation services from an application and Calling an automation service from a workflow automation.