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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, flow runners, and even 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.

The UI displays a list of configured work queues

For each work queue you'll see its:

  • Name
  • Status (for example, "active")
  • Tags (the work queue serves flow runs with these tags)
  • Concurrency limit (the maximum number of flow runs that can be running concurrently on this queue)

Click Create Work Queue to create a new work queue. You'll be able to specify the details for work served by this queue.

Creating a new work queue in the Orion UI

Click on the name of any work queue to see details about it. This panel shows you the:

  • Status
  • CLI command to run an agent that polls this work queue
  • Configuration details

You can also pause a work queue from this panel.

Viewing details of a work queue including agent configuration string

Click Edit to make changes to the work queue configuration, including deleting the work queue.