Amazon's Simple Workflow Service (SWF) is a workflow-management service that helps build applications that can handle work through distributed components. Using SWF, you can define a number of tasks that can be executed in a predefined sequence. You can build scalable, resilient, and truly distributed applications using Amazon SWF. You can schedule tasks and define dependencies and concurrency depending on the logical workflow of the application. This chapter introduces you to workflows, workflow history, actors, tasks, domains, object identifiers, task lists, workflow execution closure, life cycle, polling for tasks, execution, access key, and secret key, SWF endpoints, and managing access with Identity and Access Management (IAM).
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the basic concepts of SWF, with respect to the scope...