AWS Step Functions adds support for string manipulation, new comparison operators, and improved output processing

Posted on: Aug 13, 2020

AWS Step Functions announces enhancements to Amazon States Language, making it easier for you to build workflows. Customers now have more flexibility within their state machine definition and allow for more dynamic behaviour within their workflow application with enhanced Choice and Task states.

AWS Step Functions allows developers to assemble AWS services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), into a serverless workflow in minutes. Step Functions ensures that the steps in the serverless workflow are followed reliably, that the information is passed between stages, and errors are handled automatically. Amazon States Language is the JSON-based language used to write declarative state machines to define durable and event-driven workflows in AWS Step Functions.

When building workflow applications, customers can use additional Choice State operators such as test for null value and the existence of a variable, wildcarding, and variable to variable comparison. This new set of features allow global access to the context object, dynamic timeouts, and result selection. You can also use built-in intrinsic functions such as string and array construction, string to JSON and JSON to string.

There is no additional charge to the customers to use these new features.

To get started, please visit the AWS Step Functions Documentation and view our blog post.  

These features are available in all AWS Commercial (except China) and AWS GovCloud regions where AWS Step Functions is available.

To learn more about AWS Step Functions, please visit the AWS Step Functions Page