January 2026 Summaries

Tines, a platform handling over a billion automated actions weekly, has restructured its resource orchestration approach to address the challenges of fair-share resource distribution in a multi-tenant environment, ensuring equitable access and preventing system overload. The company transitioned from a per-story token bucket approach to a more robust system focusing on deterministic concurrency gates and continuously accruing per-story budgets. This new method includes a concurrency gate that caps the fraction of total workers consumed by any action starts, and a budget system that limits the number of actions a story can initiate. These changes aim to maintain predictable performance during high-demand periods and prevent any single story from monopolizing resources. The platform uses Sidekiq, PostgreSQL, and Redis to manage workflows, and has implemented measures such as temporary dampening of parallelism to prevent synchronized spikes. Despite the improvements, Tines is exploring further enhancements, such as batch database writes and dedicated queues for I/O-heavy actions, to address database write amplification issues and continue scaling efficiently.

AI adoption in security has increased significantly, yet many security teams continue to face high manual workloads and burnout, as reported by a survey of over 1,800 security leaders and practitioners for the Voice of Security 2026 report. While AI's potential is promising, foundational gaps hinder its full impact, and despite increased board-level attention, alignment between security priorities and business objectives remains challenging. AI governance is becoming essential, with many organizations implementing formalized AI policies to tackle anticipated future threats. Security professionals report high workloads, with 81% experiencing increased demands over the past year, leading to burnout due to manual tasks that could be automated. Despite these challenges, 86% of respondents are optimistic about AI's impact on their careers, with AI literacy and prompt engineering seen as crucial skills for the future. Intelligent workflows are identified as a key missing component, with 92% of security professionals valuing their potential to enhance productivity and compliance, indicating a shift towards AI-driven, cloud-native, and compliance-first security practices.

Tines faced a critical engineering challenge as their PostgreSQL output_payloads table neared the 32TB limit, posing risks to workflow continuity. To address this, they explored partitioning strategies to manage their rapidly growing 17TB table, which held essential event data in JSON format. Partitioning was preferred over sharding to avoid complexity, as it divides a large table into smaller, more manageable sub-tables, improving query performance by reducing the data scanned per query. They experimented with several strategies, ultimately favoring a two-level partitioning approach based on root_story_id and id, allowing for balanced data distribution and efficient querying. This strategy required reverse-engineering PostgreSQL's hash-based partitioning logic to query partitions directly, significantly enhancing performance by reducing CPU load and execution times. The project involved phased rollout with dual writes, verification using Github's scientist library for data consistency, and a gradual shift to reading primarily from the newly optimized table. Despite the challenges, this approach mitigated the issues of inefficient range queries and ensured consistent performance, showcasing the importance of systematic experimentation and testing in optimizing database management.

Tines, an intelligent workflow platform, offers flexible deployment options to accommodate the diverse needs of organizations, including those in regulated industries or the government sector. It can be deployed either in the cloud or as a self-hosted solution, with approximately 80% of its enterprise workflows being cloud-based. Cloud deployments offer the advantage of automatic updates, SOC2 Type 2 certification, and encrypted data, while Tines Tunnel facilitates secure connections between cloud infrastructure and private networks. For organizations requiring full control, self-hosting enables compliance and security customization, allowing Tines to run on various container orchestration platforms like Docker or Kubernetes. Additionally, Tines supports the integration of preferred LLMs into workflows, with default AI features powered by Anthropic’s Claude via AWS Bedrock, but also permitting the use of other AI providers. The platform emphasizes the inherent benefits of cloud deployment, such as flexibility, scalability, and cost savings, while ensuring compliance and enterprise-grade features regardless of the deployment method.

Tines introduces an AI interaction layer designed to integrate AI agents, copilots, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and clients within a unified, secure environment, addressing the challenges of fragmented AI systems. This layer aims to bridge the gap between AI proof-of-concepts and production by providing a standardized, secure approach for AI integration, enhancing connectivity, governance, and scalability across operations. By serving as a single interface, Tines enables teams to manage AI interactions efficiently, supporting intelligent workflows that ensure visibility and control while facilitating AI deployment in real-world scenarios. With built-in oversight and audit trails, Tines offers a secure, consistent framework for leveraging AI in day-to-day tasks, promoting responsible scaling and integration across organizations.

Tines, an automation platform, is showcased through a blog series that highlights its various applications in enhancing security operations. The series covers topics such as orchestrating and automating security workflows, managing threat intelligence, governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), and improving vulnerability management. It emphasizes the use of AI-powered orchestration to help security teams operate more efficiently and foster innovation. Additionally, the series offers practical resources for optimizing workflows using Tines, aimed at providing best practices for users to create more effective and impactful security operations.

The blog series explores the role of AI-powered orchestration in enhancing Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) capabilities, allowing security teams to operate more efficiently and innovate rapidly. It discusses leveraging automation not only within Security Operations Centers (SOC) but also in broader areas such as vulnerability management, governance, risk management, compliance (GRC), and threat intelligence. The series includes practical resources aimed at improving security operations through advanced workflow orchestration and automation, highlighting Tines' capabilities in providing tailored solutions.

In 2025, Tines celebrated a year of innovation and creativity, significantly surpassing its goal with 357 product updates and enhancing its intelligent workflow platform. Key developments included the introduction of Change Control, allowing multiple builders to work simultaneously, and the launch of the AI Agent action, which facilitates the creation and deployment of customizable AI agents. Tines also integrated Large Language Models (LLMs) into its workflows through Model Context Protocols (MCPs), enhancing AI support capabilities. The platform saw improvements in case management with better organization and task management features. Tines celebrated its community through events, competitions, and awards, highlighting notable workflows such as TERRA and EDgaR, which demonstrated the platform's versatility across industries. The Tines Library achieved a milestone with its 1,000th entry, showcasing community-created workflows. Looking ahead to 2026, Tines aims to enhance user experience, expand interaction surfaces, and deepen understanding of workflow maturity while continuing to engage and celebrate its builder community globally.