Work Queues

Work Queues and agents work together to bridge your orchestration environment — a local Prefect API server or Prefect Cloud — and your execution environments. Work queues gather flow runs for scheduled deployments, and agents pick up work from their configured work queues.

Work queue configuration lets you specify which queues handle which flow runs. You can filter runs based on tags and specific deployments.

You can create, edit, manage, and delete work queues through the Prefect API server, Prefect Cloud UI, or Prefect CLI commands.

Managing work queues

To manage work queues in the UI, click the Work Queues icon. This displays a list of currently configured work queues.

You can also pause a work queue from this page by using the toggle.

Select the + button to create a new work queue. You'll be able to specify the details for work served by this queue.

Work queue settings are filters

Note that work queue settings are filters and restrict the work queue to servicing flow runs only for deployments that meet the filtering criteria. For example, if you do not specify any tags, the work queue will serve any flow runs. However, if you added a "test" tag to the Tags list, the work queue would serve only flow runs configured with a "test" tag.

See the Work Queues and Agents documentation for details on configuring agents and work queues, including creating work queues from the Prefect CLI.

Click on the name of any work queue to see details about it. This page includes the Prefect CLI command you can use to create an agent that pulls flow runs from this work queue.

You can also pause a work queue from this page by using the toggle.

The commands button enables you to edit or delete the work queue.