AWS Step Functions
AWS Step Functions offers both Standard or Express Workflow types. Standard Workflows are ideal for long-running, durable, and auditable workflows. Express Workflows are ideal for high-volume, event-processing workloads such as IoT data ingestion, streaming data processing and transformation, and mobile application backends. A Standard Workflow has a maximum duration of 1 year, compared to 5 minutes for an Express Workflow. Both Standard and Express Workflows support execution history logging to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Publishing logs doesn't block or slow down executions, allowing you to select the log level required for the workflow. When inspecting a workflow consider using Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights to interactively search and analyze your workflow log data. Using the GetExecutionHistory API to explore the execution history for Standard Workflows may save you from writing code. AWS Step Functions state transitions are throttled using a token bucket scheme. Estimate the state transitions expected and match to quotas for bucket size and refill rates. Trade off between Standard Workflow with throttling, or Express Workflow with unlimited bucket size and refill rate.
An Express Workflow can start either synchronously or asynchronously. Select a synchronous invocation when you can wait for the result and prefer to develop applications without the need to develop additional code to handle errors, retries, or execute parallel tasks. Synchronous Express execution API calls do not contribute to the existing account capacity limits. Step Functions will provide capacity on demand and will automatically scale with sustained workloads. Surges in workloads may be throttled until capacity is available. A Synchronous Express Workflow can be invoked from Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, or by using the StartSyncExecution API call.
Invoke an Asynchronous Express Workflow if you don’t require an immediate response output such as messaging services, or data processing that other services don’t depend on. An Asynchronous Express Workflow returns a confirmation the workflow has started, and you poll Amazon CloudWatch Logs for the result. An Asynchronous Express Workflow can be started in response to an event, by a nested workflow in Step Functions, or by using the StartExecution API call.
