Posted On: Dec 17, 2014
You can now assign priority levels to Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF) workflows and activities, giving you more control over the order in which work is completed. Since SWF workflows automatically dispatch higher priority activities ahead of lower priority activities, you can design your workflows to execute in the order and at the speed that suits your application. For example, if your product catalog application has higher performance requirements for processing price or availability updates on more commonly viewed items, you can set priority to handle those tasks ahead of processing new product images or adding color/size options.
To get started, log into Amazon SWF in the AWS Management Console and select a workflow. You can then assign an integer priority value to it or one of the tasks it dispatches. Alternatively, you can set activity and workflow priority using the Flow Framework for Java, Ruby Flow, or the AWS SDKs. Activity tasks and workflows with a higher number will be dispatched ahead of tasks and workflows that have lower numbers. To learn more, please visit Setting Task Priority in the Amazon SWF Developer Guide.