Image generated using DALL-E Background Okta’s inbox platform supports various products in Okta’s Workforce Identity Cloud, where human input is required. It is most notably instrumental in the Access Request flow of Okta Identity Governance. A lot of what we do is trigger-based. These triggers can be a human action — “grant access when the manager approves” — or a time event — “revoke access after 24 hours.” This post will explain how we leverage asynchronous tasks using message brokers like Google Pub/Sub and Google Cloud Tasks to take actions based on these triggers. Worker tasks Internally, we call all asynchronous tasks “worker tasks.” We have an internal framework that exposes an interface to create and execute tasks while abstracting away the details of which message broker the task is sent to. For us, a task is a function that needs to run, along with the metadata that dictates.