Step Functions

3 ways to manage concurrency in serverless applications

AWS, EventBridge, Kinesis, Lambda, Serverless, Step Functions / April 5, 2023

Many software engineering concepts show up in different contexts. Modularity, the single-responsibility principle and separation of concerns are just a few examples that come to mind. They are equally applicable to how we write code, architect our systems and organize our teams. Similarly, there are many parallels between multithreaded programming and event-driven architectures. For example, …

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A practical guide to testing AWS Step Functions

AWS, Serverless, Step Functions, Testing / April 7, 2023

Testing Step Functions can be a daunting task. However, with a little preparation and effort, the testing process can be simplified and streamlined. In this article, we will provide a practical strategy on how to test Step Functions. So let’s start by setting the stage and introducing the players. What makes Step Functions hard to test? …

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Choreography vs Orchestration in the land of serverless

AWS, EventBridge, Lambda, Serverless, SNS, Step Functions / April 5, 2023

Choreography and Orchestration are two modes of interaction in a microservices architecture. In orchestration, there is a controller (the ‘orchestrator’) that controls the interaction between services. It dictates the control flow of the business logic and is responsible for making sure that everything happens on cue. This follows the request-response paradigm. In choreography, every service …

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Complete Guide to Step Functions: new lessons and 50% off sale is now on

AWS, Me, Step Functions / December 26, 2019

First of all, I want to wish you all a merry Xmas and happy new year! And thank you for your readership and support over the years. Now that re:invent 2019 has come and gone, I have updated my course Complete Guide to Step Functions to include the latest announcements: Step Functions 101: added a lesson …

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How to do blue-green deployment for Step Functions

AWS, Lambda, Programming, Serverless, Step Functions / April 9, 2023

A client asked me the other day: “What happens to the running executions when I update a state machine?” Sadly, the answer is likely that existing executions would break if you have changed the input/output of the Lambda functions they call. The solution is to use specific versions or aliases of the functions instead. But …

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Serverless Step Functions: no more leaky abstractions

AWS, Lambda, Programming, Serverless, Step Functions / September 5, 2020

I have some exciting news to share with you about the Serverless Step Functions plugin. One of the main pain points of using the plugin was that you needed to use fully-formed ARNs. We addressed this in v1.18.0 by supporting CloudFormation intrinsic functions Fn:GetAtt and Ref. This makes it possible for you to reference a …

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Step Functions as an ad-hoc scheduling mechanism

AWS, Design Patterns, Lambda, Programming, Serverless, Step Functions / October 6, 2019

We previously discussed how you can implement an ad-hoc scheduling system using DynamoDB TTL as well as CloudWatch Events. And now, let’s see how you can implement the same system using AWS Step Functions and the pros and cons of this approach. As before, we will assess this approach using the following criteria: Precision: how …

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ICYMI: five updates you’ve missed about Serverless Step Functions

AWS, Lambda, Programming, Serverless, Step Functions / October 6, 2019

Over the last 6 months, we have made the Serverless Step Functions plugin better and more useful. Here are the most impactful changes, in case you missed it! Support for intrinsic function One of the main pain points of using the plugin has long been that you needed to use fully-formed ARNs. As of v1.18.0 …

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DynamoDB TTL as an ad-hoc scheduling mechanism

AWS, Design Patterns, DynamoDB, Lambda, Programming, Serverless, Step Functions / October 6, 2019

CloudWatch Events let you easily create cron jobs with Lambda. However, it’s not designed for running lots of ad-hoc tasks, each to be executed once, at a specific time. The default limit on CloudWatch Events is a lowly 100 rules per region per account. It’s a soft limit, so it’s possible to request a limit …

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