Designing Application Workflow with AWS Step Functions

Step Functions is a serverless orchestration service that makes it easy to sequence AWS Lambda functions and multiple AWS services into business-critical applications. Through workflows, you can design and run multi-step applications as a series of steps, ensuring they execute in order and as expected, handling errors, and providing consistent and reliable outcomes.

Let’s use an example to understand where Step Functions can be used. When you complete a purchase on an e-commerce website, several different tasks (steps) must be performed before the product arrives at your doorstep. As illustrated in the following diagram in Figure 15.16, when the customer places an order, the inventory service must hold the product for the customer. This is then followed by the payment process run by another Lambda function. If payment is successful, the shipping steps are initiated, and yet another Lambda function may send a notification...