Step Functions

Step Functions is an orchestration service provided by AWS to automate interactions between various AWS services, including Lambda, in a customer-defined sequence to build complicated business workflows. Every business process or task can be defined as a set of atomic steps that execute a specific piece of work. Each of these steps has inputs and outputs; the output of one step could be fed as the input to the next step. After a particular step, the following steps could be done in sequence or parallel, or even branch out, depending on certain conditions.

This process is what we call a workflow – it can also be called a state machine. The fundamental idea behind calling a workflow a state machine is that the workflow (or the business process it represents) has a specific state at any given point in time. As it progresses through the workflow, it changes from one state to another (called transition) until it reaches its final state. Let’s clarify this...