Jun 1, 2026

Developer Request Workflows

Turn Kestrel Workflows into a self-service internal developer platform. Your team requests infrastructure, deployments, and investigations in plain English — from Slack, the CLI, or the in-platform Developer Request Agent — and Kestrel routes each request to a governed, approval-gated workflow.

Raman Varma

Every platform team becomes a bottleneck eventually. A developer needs a new namespace, a bigger RDS instance, a DNS record, or just an answer about why their deployment is unhealthy — and the request lands in a Slack thread, a ticket, or a tap on the shoulder. Building a real internal developer platform to handle this self-service is usually a quarters-long project of its own.

Today we're shipping Developer Request Workflows, which turn Kestrel Workflows into exactly that: a self-service IDP your whole engineering org can use, without handing anyone the keys to production. Developers ask for what they need in plain English; Kestrel routes the request to a governed, approval-gated workflow you defined.

Three ways to ask

Requests meet your developers where they already work. The same request can come from any of three channels:

Slack
Type /kestrel-workflow followed by your request in any channel — or just mention the app. Kestrel replies in-thread, asks for anything missing, and surfaces approvals right there.
CLI
kestrel workflows request "scale the payments deployment to 5 replicas" — the terminal equivalent of the Slack command, ideal for scripts and CI/CD.
In-platform Developer Request Agent
A conversational chat in the Kestrel dashboard for developers who'd rather click than type a slash command.

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The Developer Request Agent

In the dashboard, the Developer Requests page gives every developer a focused, conversational way to ask for what they need. Describe the request in plain English — "create a new ConfigMap in the production cluster," "scale my deployment to 5 replicas," "add a DNS record in Cloudflare" — and the agent routes it to the right workflow, asking clarifying questions inline if anything's missing.

Answers stream back conversationally, each request keeps its own history in a sidebar, and once a request is matched you get a status badge — Matched, Executing, Completed — and a link to view the execution.

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From request to running workflow

Under the hood it's the same deterministic workflow engine. To make a workflow requestable, give it a developer request trigger. When a request comes in, Kestrel matches it to your active request-triggered workflows by intent, extracts the parameters from the phrasing, and runs it — pausing for any approval gates you've defined.

Requests can target ten integrations — Kubernetes, cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure), Cloudflare, PagerDuty, Datadog, ArgoCD, GitHub, GitLab, Helm, and Vercel — across request types like Create / Provision / Deploy, Edit / Update / Scale, Delete / Remove, and Get / Investigate / Debug. So "provision an MSK cluster with 3 brokers in us-east-1," "add a PagerDuty escalation policy for the payments team," and "why is the checkout service unhealthy?" all become governed, self-service actions.

Governed by default

This is what makes it safe to open up. Every request workflow runs inside the access control and approval model: scope a workflow with Allowed Users and Allowed Groups, fence it to specific clusters, namespaces, cloud accounts, zones, or repositories, and require approval before anything runs. Developers get a golden path; you keep the guardrails.

Building, activating, and approving these workflows stays with your platform administrators, while developers get a focused view for submitting requests — so you can roll out self-service automation to the whole org without expanding who can touch production.

Nothing falls through the cracks

When a request doesn't match any existing workflow, the developer is told their platform team has been notified — and the request shows up on the admin Workflow Requests page, complete with an AI-suggested workflow to fulfill it. From there your team can Review & Deploy the suggestion, Create a new workflow, or Reject the request. Every unmet request becomes a prompt to expand your platform's golden paths.

Getting Started

Add a developer request trigger to a workflow, scope it with Allowed Users and Groups, and activate it. Your team can then make requests from Slack with /kestrel-workflow, from the terminal with kestrel workflows request, or from the Developer Requests page in the dashboard.