AWS Step Functions features

Using AWS Step Functions, you define your workflows as state machines, which transform complex code into easy to understand statements and diagrams. Building apps, and confirming that they are implementing your desired functionality, is quicker and easier. Read more about how Step Functions works.

AWS Step Functions provides ready-made steps for your workflow called states that implement basic service primitives for you, which means you can remove that logic from your application. States can pass data to other states and microservices, handle exceptions, add timeouts, make decisions, execute multiple paths in parallel, and more. Learn more about states.

AWS Step Functions provides enhanced variable and payload management features to speed up the development of your applications. This allows developers to store and reference payload data more easily within Step Functions workflows using Variables. You can assign and reference data at any state in your workflows without passing through intermediate states, simplifying payload management across workflow states. Developers can utilize built-in data transformation capabilities with JSONata that reduces the need for custom code, improving productivity. JSONata adds comprehensive data transformation capabilities like date/time formatting and mathematical operations, and allows you to perform data manipulations directly in workflows. You can also incrementally adopt Variables and JSONata in both new and existing workflows, at either the workflow or individual state level, while existing workflows remain fully functional without requiring any changes. These capabilities enable developers to create more complex and efficient workflows with fewer states further reducing overall costs.

Using AWS Step Functions Service Integrations, you can configure your Step Functions workflow to call over 220 AWS services. This includes:

• Compute services (AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Fargate)
• Database services (Amazon DynamoDB)
• Messaging services (Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS), data processing
• Analytics services (Amazon Athena, AWS Batch, AWS Glue, Amazon EMR, and AWS Glue DataBrew)
• Machine learning services (Amazon SageMaker)
• APIs created by Amazon API Gateway

 Learn more about Service Integrations

AWS Step Functions supports integration with AWS services, SaaS applications, and private APIs, powered by AWS PrivateLink and Amazon VPC Lattice, making it easier for customers to accelerate innovation and simplify modernization of distributed applications across public and private networks, both on-premises and in the cloud. You can bring the capabilities of AWS cloud and external SaaS applications to new and existing workloads, achieving higher performance, agility, and lower costs. You can build, manage, and orchestrate multi-step workflows composed of your applications, AWS services and SaaS applications, without needing to write custom code or maintain additional infrastructure. With fully-managed connectivity to private resources, you can securely orchestrate workflows across your legacy systems and cloud-native applications, allowing you to accelerate your innovations on AWS while driving higher security and regulatory compliance. These advancements allow you to achieve faster time to market by eliminating the need to write and maintain custom networking or integration code, enabling developers to build extensible systems and add new capabilities easily.

AWS Step Functions can coordinate any application that can make an HTTPS connection, regardless of where it is hosted—for example, on Amazon EC2 instances, mobile devices, or on-premises servers. Using Step Functions, you can quickly create distributed applications that leverage AWS services as well as your own microservices. Learn more about activity tasks.

AWS Step Functions coordinates your existing Lambda functions and microservices into robust applications, and lets you quickly rewire them into new compositions. The tasks in your workflow can run anywhere, including on instances, containers, functions, and mobile devices. Learn how to reuse existing application components.

AWS Step Functions keeps the logic of your application strictly separated from the implementation of your application. You can add, move, swap, and reorder steps without having to make changes to your business logic. Through this separation of concerns, your workflows gain modularity, simplified maintenance, scalability, and code reuse.

AWS Step Functions maintains the state of your application during execution, including tracking what step of execution it is in, and storing data that is moving between the steps of your workflow. This means you don't have to manage state yourself with data stores or by building complex state management into all of your tasks.

AWS Step Functions automatically handles errors and exceptions with built-in try/catch and retry, whether the task takes seconds or months to complete. You can automatically retry failed or timed-out tasks, respond differently to different types of errors, and recover gracefully by falling back to designated clean up and recovery code. Learn more about Step Functions error handling and how you can handle error conditions using a state machine.

AWS Step Functions delivers real-time diagnostics and dashboards, integrates with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail, and logs every execution, including overall state, failed steps, inputs, and outputs. If things go wrong, you can quickly identify not only where, but why, and quickly troubleshoot and remediate failures. Learn more about Step Functions monitoring and logging.

Launching an application is as simple as pressing a button, then watching the steps execute visually, so you can quickly verify that everything is operating in order – and as expected. The console clearly highlights errors, so you can quickly pinpoint their root-cause, and troubleshoot issues.

AWS Step Functions has built-in fault tolerance and maintains service capacity across multiple Availability Zones in each region to protect applications against individual machine or data center failures. This helps ensure high availability for both the service itself and for the application workflow it operates.

AWS Step Functions automatically scales the operations and underlying compute to run the steps of your application for you in response to changing workloads. Step Functions scales automatically to help ensure the performance of your application workflow remains consistent as the frequency of requests increases.

AWS Step Functions adds Express Workflows. Express Workflows support event rates greater than 100,000 per second, enabling you to build high volume, short duration workflows.

Express Workflows can coordinate AWS Lambda function invocations, AWS IoT Rules Engine actions, and Amazon EventBridge events from over a hundred AWS third-party SaaS event sources.

Learn more about Express and Standard workflows and how they can be used in sample automating architectures in the Step Functions use cases page.

Step Functions can iterate over objects such as images, logs, or CSV files stored in Amazon S3, then launch and coordinate thousands of parallel workflows to process the data. You can more quickly and more easily scale thousands of concurrent workflow executions, helping you analyze millions of logs, iterate over terabytes of data or process documents, images, and video files. Learn more about the Step Functions Map state for building large-scale parallel workflows.

AWS Step Functions is integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and recommends a least-privileged IAM policy for all of the resources used in your workflow. Step Functions supports VPC Endpoints (VPCE) using AWS PrivateLink. you You can access AWS Step Functions from VPC-enabled AWS Lambda functions and other AWS services without traversing the public internet. Learn more about Step Functions security and authentication.

AWS Step Functions is a HIPAA eligible service, and can be used with applications containing healthcare-related information such as personal health information (PHI). Step Functions is also compliant with SOC (System & Organization Control) measures, and the results of these third-party audits are available on the AWS SOC Compliance site. AWS Step Functions also conforms to other common compliance standards. Understand the compliance scope by reviewing the AWS Cloud Security site.

With AWS Step Functions, you pay for each transition from one state to the next. Billing is metered by state transition, and you do not pay for idle time, regardless of how long each state persists (up to one year). This keeps Step Functions cost-effective as you scale from a few executions to tens of millions. Learn more about Step Functions pricing.