THIS HAS BEEN MOVED TO OFFICIAL PREFECT DOCUMENTATION AND IS OUT OF DATE: https://docs.prefect.io/v3/tutorials/modal

Prefect is the worlds best orchestrator. Modal is the worlds best serverless compute framework. It only makes sense that they would fit together perfectly.

In this short guide, we’ll walk you through building your first prefect deployment that runs on modal every hour, and build out a scalable framework to grow your project.

You can see all the functioning code here: https://github.com/Ben-Epstein/prefect-modal

We’ll walk step-by-step through the following:

1. Create a prefect account
2. Create a modal account
3. Create your github repo
4. Give prefect access to your github repo
5. Connect prefect and modal
6. Configure CI/CD

Let’s quickly look at an architecture diagram of what we’re building.

We’ll be building a full serverless infrastructure framework for scheduling and provisioning workflows. GitHub will act as the source of truth, Prefect will be our orchestrator, and Modal will be our serverless infrastructure, paying for only the CPU time we use.

Let’s quickly recap on some important terms:

• Flow: Some python function in a file, decorated with @flow, that is an entrypoint to do some task in prefect
• Run: A instance of a flow, executed at some time with some payload.
• Deployment: A manifest around a flow, including where it should run, when it should run, and any variables it needs to be able to run. This can “schedule” your flows, creating runs when needed.