In today's data-driven world, the speed at which you can process information is a critical competitive advantage. Yet, many organizations still rely on outdated batch processing methods, where data is collected and processed in chunks, often hours or even a full day after it's generated. This latency means missed opportunities, stale analytics, and a reactive, rather than proactive, business posture.
What if you could initiate powerful data processing, ETL jobs, and sync workflows the very instant an event occurs? What if you could do it with a single, simple API call from anywhere in your stack?
This is the power of event-driven triggers. With trigger.do, you can move beyond cumbersome cron jobs and complex orchestration tools to build truly real-time data pipelines.
Traditionally, kicking off a data pipeline has been a complex affair, fraught with challenges that slow down development and introduce fragility.
These challenges create a system where data feels slow, and the architecture feels fragile.
trigger.do flips the model. Instead of your services needing to understand the "how" of data processing, they only need to announce that something "has happened." This is the essence of an event-driven architecture.
Define your business logic once and trigger it from anywhere.
Your data pipeline—whether it's a simple sync or a complex, multi-step agentic workflow involving AI enrichment—is defined as code within trigger.do. Your applications simply send a secure API call to trigger it.
Let’s see how this works with a practical example. Imagine a new user signs up for your platform. You want to immediately enrich their profile with third-party data and load it into your data warehouse for analysis.
Instead of building this logic into your user service, you just trigger a workflow.
import { Do } from '@do-sdk/client';
const client = new Do({ apiKey: process.env.DO_API_KEY });
// A new user has just signed up in our main application.
async function triggerDataEnrichmentPipeline(user: { id: string; email: string; }) {
console.log(`A new user signed up: ${user.email}. Triggering data pipeline.`);
try {
// Trigger the "user-data-enrichment" workflow defined in trigger.do
const { workflowRunId } = await client.trigger('user-data-enrichment', {
payload: {
userId: user.id,
signupTimestamp: new Date().toISOString(),
},
});
console.log(`Data pipeline started. Workflow Run ID: ${workflowRunId}`);
// The main application's responsibility ends here.
// The trigger.do workflow now handles the ETL process asynchronously.
return { success: true, workflowRunId };
} catch (error) {
console.error('Failed to trigger data pipeline:', error);
// Add retry logic or alert monitoring systems
return { success: false, error };
}
}
// Somewhere in your user service, after a successful registration:
triggerDataEnrichmentPipeline({ id: 'usr_xyz789', email: 'alex.smith@example.com' });
In this example, the user service's job is done the moment it calls client.trigger(). It has successfully initiated a complex backend process without having any knowledge of its implementation details. The user-data-enrichment workflow, defined and managed within trigger.do, now takes over to perform the ETL asynchronously.
Adopting an event-driven approach with trigger.do for your data pipelines unlocks several powerful advantages:
Act on data the moment it’s generated. When an order is placed, a user signs up, or an IoT device sends a signal, your pipeline runs now, not tonight. This empowers you with up-to-the-second analytics and the ability to build responsive, context-aware applications.
Your source applications are completely decoupled from your data infrastructure. Your web app, mobile backend, or even a third-party webhook source only needs to know how to send a single, secure API request. This makes your entire system more resilient, modular, and easier to evolve.
Your pipeline's business logic lives as code in one place. No more hunting for scripts scattered across servers or trying to decipher complex DAGs. This “Business-as-Code” approach simplifies maintenance, testing, and understanding for the entire team.
All API trigger endpoints are secured with API keys by default. You have full control over who can trigger which workflow. Furthermore, trigger.do provides the reliability needed for critical data tasks, managing retries, and providing observability into every run.
The "new user" workflow is just the beginning. Any event can become a trigger for a sophisticated data process:
Stop waiting for your data. The modern data stack is event-driven, and trigger.do is the simplest way to embrace it. By replacing complex schedulers and orchestration with simple, secure, and reliable API triggers, you can build faster, more resilient data pipelines and unlock the true value of your data in real-time.
Ready to move your data pipelines to real-time? Sign up for trigger.do and trigger your first workflow in minutes.