Simple Workflow Service (SWF)

• SWF enables applications for a range of use cases, including media processing, web application back-ends, business process workflows, and analytics pipelines, to be designed as a coordination of tasks.

• Think of SWF as a fully-managed state tracker and task coordinator in AWS.

• Tasks represent invocations of various processing steps in an application which can be performed by executable code, web service calls, human actions, and scripts.

• SWF helps developers build, run, and scale background jobs that have parallel or sequential steps.

Step Functions vs Simple Workflow Service

• Use Step Functions for all your new applications because it provides a more productive and agile approach to coordinating application components using visual workflows.

• Use SWF if you require external signals to intervene in your processes, or you would like to launch child processes that return a result to a parent.

• With SWF, instead of writing state machines in declarative JSON, you write a decider program to separate activity steps from decision steps.

  • This provides you complete control over your orchestration logic.

    • It increases the complexity of developing applications.