Documentation

DEVELOPER GUIDE
Key concepts, tutorials, and instructions for using features

AMAZON STATES LANGUAGE SPECIFICATION
The language used to define state machines in AWS Step Functions

API REFERENCE
How to use the Step Functions API, including actions and data types

STATELINT ON GITHUB
A command-line validator for Amazon States Language JSON files

SERVERLESS FRAMEWORK PLUG-IN
An open-source web framework to help you develop and deploy serverless applications

CREATE A SERVERLESS WORKFLOW
A 10-minute tutorial that shows you how to design and run a simple serverless workflow

AWS re:Invent 2018

Discover more about AWS Step Functions at the following sessions:

  • Sessions
  • Chalk Talks
  • Workshops
  • Builder's Sessions
  • Sessions

  • Serverless State Management & Orchestration for Modern Apps
    Keeping track of state and orchestrating the components of a distributed application is complex. AWS Step Functions makes the job simpler, faster, and more intuitive. In this session, learn how to leverage AWS Step Functions to design and run workflows for your serverless, containerized, and instance-based architectures. We explore practical applications of orchestration spanning different industries and workloads. For each, we walk through the architecture, lessons learned, and business outcomes. Expect to leave this session with a practical understanding of how to use orchestration to express your application’s business logic more productively while improving its resilience.

    ML Workflows with Amazon SageMaker and AWS Step Functions
    Learn how you can build, train, and deploy machine learning workflows for Amazon SageMaker on AWS Step Functions. Learn how to stitch together services, such as AWS Glue, with your Amazon SageMaker model training to build feature-rich machine learning applications, and you learn how to build serverless ML workflows with less code. Cox Automotive also shares how it combined Amazon SageMaker and Step Functions to improve collaboration between data scientists and software engineers. We also share some new features to build and manage ML workflows even faster.

    Modernizing Media Supply Chains with AWS Serverless
    Learn how Fox and Discovery modernized their media processing workflows to positively impact operations and business results. In this session, we examine each company's production architecture and learn how they utilize AWS services such as AWS Elemental Media Services, AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, Amazon API Gateway, and container toolsets. You also get insights into new business capabilities enabled by their AWS serverless architecture, including automation of content assembly and quality control as well as increased customer engagement with personalization and improved processing performance.

  • Chalk Talks

  • Automate Testing & Deployment of Modern Serverless Apps
    Continuous deployment enables you to be more productive and deliver a more stable product. In this session, learn how to utilize CI/CD techniques when deploying AWS services like AWS Step Functions, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Lambda resources. Get into the nuts and bolts of handling versions, testing, and deploying using AWS CodePipeline, and monitoring performance using Amazon CloudWatch.

    Building Serverless Machine Learning Workflows
    Modern machine learning workflows leverage AWS services, such as Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Comprehend, to extract, validate, mutate, and enrich your data. Some might drive transactional systems that use machine learning to generate metadata for media assets, while others might derive insights by visualizing customer interaction sentiment from call logs. They all share a common challenge: orchestrating a combination of distinct sequential and parallel steps that are fulfilled by independent microservices. Join us as we examine how workflows can be used to manage that orchestration in a way that is scalable, reliable, and easy to maintain and run. We contrast two approaches for creating such workflows: a traditional monolithic approach and a serverless approach utilizing AWS Steps Functions.

  • Workshops

  • Build Modern Applications that Align with Twelve-Factor Methods
    Twelve-Factor designs improve component reuse and resilience for developers building large-scale software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. In recent years, the Twelve-Factor guidelines have become a source of best practices for both developers and operations engineers, regardless of the application’s use case and at nearly any scale. In this workshop, create a modern app to see how the Twelve-Factor Application guidelines align with serverless best practices. Learn how to address those Twelve-Factor guidelines that don’t directly align with serverless architectures or are interpreted differently, and practice by implementing examples using AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, Amazon API Gateway, and the AWS Code services. Bring a laptop (Windows/OSX/Linux all supported). Tablets are not appropriate. We also recommend installing the current version of Chrome or Firefox.

  • Builder's Sessions

  • Manage Long-Lived Transactions with AWS Step Functions
    AWS Step Functions is a fully-managed serverless workflow-management service. Using visual workflows, you can easily manage long-running processes and coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices. Join us to learn how you can use Step Functions to implement the Saga design pattern, which is particularly useful for dealing with the complexities of a long-lived transaction that spans across distributed components in a microservices architecture. You need your own laptop with administrator permissions, with the AWS CLI, AWS SAM CLI, and Go installed, and an active AWS account with administrator permissions.

    Build a Serverless Media Analysis & Image Processing Solution
    Use AWS Step Functions along with Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Transcribe, and Amazon Comprehend to build a serverless application that extracts meaningful data from audio, image, and video files.

Browse the AWS re:Invent 2018 catalog »

What's new

Date Announcement  
Nov 29 AWS Step Functions Adds Eight More Service Integrations Blog
Nov 28 Amazon SageMaker Announces New Machine Learning Capabilities for Orchestration, Experimentation and Collaboration Blog
Jul 31 AWS IoT Rules Engine Now Supports Step Functions Action Documentation
Jul 11 AWS Step Functions Now Available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai)  
Jun 28 AWS Step Functions Now Available in AWS GovCloud (US)  
May 31 AWS Step Functions is Now a HIPAA Eligible Service Blog
May 16 Higher Throughput Workflows for AWS Step Functions
 Documentation
May 09 AWS Step Functions Regional Expansions
  
Jan 24 AWS Step Functions Now Available in Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Canada (Central) Regions
  

See all AWS Step Functions announcements »

Webinars

1 / 5

Build on Serverless: Breaking the Monolith with Step Functions

Traditional monolithic architectures are hard to scale, and can become complex to update and maintain as the code base grows. The good news is that refactoring a monolith safely and easily is possible. Join AWS Solutions Architects Angela Wang and Ronald Widha Sunarno to see how. Angela and Ron will break a monolithic image processing application into multiple functions using AWS Step Functions.

2 / 5

Media Processing Workflows at High Velocity & Scale using Orchestration & Machine Learning

In this AWS Tech Talk, you’ll hear how AWS customers have improved media supply chains using machine learning in areas such as metadata tagging, translations, transcriptions, and cloud services. You’ll also learn how to use orchestration to optimize velocity and scale of multi-stage media pipelines by examining serverless, event-driven and artificial intelligence M&E use cases.

3 / 5

Using AWS Batch and AWS Step Functions to Design and Run High Throughput Workflows

AWS Batch enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. Learn how you can reliably orchestrate your batch workflow at scale using AWS Step Functions. This Tech Talk presents an architecture using AWS Batch and AWS Step Functions which fully manages the efficient provisioning of resources and the execution of your workflows.

4 / 5

Serverless Orchestration of AWS Step Functions

Are you building a serverless application with two or more Lambda functions? In this deep-dive session, learn how to use AWS CloudFormation and the AWS Serverless Application Model to deploy Step Functions state machines, AWS Lambda functions, and IAM roles and policies. We'll also demonstrate how Step Functions orchestrates state transitions and error handling, and how state input/output works.

5 / 5

Announcing AWS Step Functions

This short video gives you an introduction to AWS Step Functions, a reliable way to orchestrate your distributed applications. Hear how Step Functions automatically triggers and tracks each step, and retries when there are errors, so your application executes in order and as expected. You’ll also learn how Step Functions tracks the state of each step so you can diagnose and debug problems quickly.

Explore other AWS Online Tech Talks »

Blogs

sfn_product-icon_90
Jeff Barr
November 29, 2018

Reference architectures

Media Analytics

This reference implementation provides guidance to consider when extracting metadata from media files, and provides a serverless AWS solution that combines Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Transcribe, and Amazon Comprehend.

AWS Answers

Video on Demand

This solution illustrates best practices for implementing video-on-demand on AWS. AWS Lambda triggers AWS Step Functions for ingest, processing, and publishing workflows, and AWS Elemental MediaConvert performs transcoding.

AWS Answers

Image processing and backend

Use AWS Step Functions to orchestrate a serverless processing workflow that processes photos uploaded to S3, extracts metadata from the image, uses image recognition to tag objects in the photo, and creates a photo thumbnail.

GitHub

EBS Snapshot Management

This Snapshot Management Application demonstrates how to use AWS Step Functions with Amazon CloudWatch Events, AWS Lambda and AWS CloudFormation to build a serverless solution for EBS snapshot lifecycle management.

GitHub  |  Blog

Batch for Life Sciences

This companion tutorial to the Genomics Workflows on AWS blog series packages bioinformatics applications using Docker, creates an AWS Batch environment for analysis, and deploys Step Functions to control data processing.

GitHub

Synchronize S3 buckets

Learn how to use AWS Step Functions to one-way synchronize an Amazon S3 source bucket into another S3 destination bucket in a reliable and efficient way, without having to create and populate a new bucket from scratch.

GitHub  |  Blog

Videos

State Machines in the Wild! How Customers use AWS Step Functions

A series of innovative, high-impact, and just plain crazy applications of state machines from all sorts of customers, including guest star Coca-Cola

Coordinate Microservices, Build Serverless Apps & Automate Tasks  

Hear how AWS customers like Yelp are using Step Functions to break down monoliths, automate recurring tasks, and reliably build and scale multi-step applications.  

Best Practices for Orchestrating AWS Lambda Workloads

See how Step Functions are different from Amazon SWF, how to get started with Step Functions, and how to use them to take your Lambda-based applications to the next level.

Media Intelligence for the Cloud with Amazon AI

Learn how to extract video metadata using Amazon AI services in combination with AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, Amazon ECS, and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances.

Automating Incident Response and Forensics

This session focuses on automating your cloud incident response processes covering external and insider threats, triggers, canaries, containment, and data loss prevention.

EC2/ECS Operations Magic with Step Functions

Michael Fischer, lead site reliability engineer at Segment, shares how they use Step Functions to manage EC2 and ECS to help their customers collect data.

Building Advanced Serverless Applications with AWS Step Functions

Hear how using Step Functions to build serverless apps can help developers create reliable products that scale while reclaiming time and energy.

Learn more about AWS Step Functions

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