Understanding Amazon Step Functions and Exploring Different State Machines

What is Amazon Step Functions

AWS Step Functions is a serverless orchestration service designed to facilitate the integration of AWS Lambda functions and various other AWS services, enabling the development of mission-critical applications. Using the visual interface provided by Step Functions, you can visualize your application’s workflow as a sequence of event-triggered steps.

Step Functions operates on the principles of state machines and tasks. In this context, a workflow is referred to as a state machine, consisting of a sequence of event-triggered steps. Each individual step within the workflow is termed a state. A Task state denotes a discrete unit of work that can be executed by an AWS service, such as AWS Lambda, and can interact with any AWS service or API.

Step Functions comes equipped with built-in controls, allowing you to monitor the status of each step within your workflow to ensure that your application runs in the desired sequence and produces the expected outcomes. Depending on your specific requirements, you can configure Step Functions to invoke AWS services like Lambda to carry out various tasks. These workflows can be tailored to process and deploy machine learning models, control AWS services like AWS Glue to create extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes, or even establish long-running automated workflows for applications that necessitate human intervention.