Amazon Simple Workflow

The Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF) provides a way to build, run, and scale background jobs that have parallel or sequential steps. With Amazon SWF, you can coordinate work across distributed components, tracking the state of tasks.

In Amazon SWF, a task represents a logical unit of work that is performed by a component of your application. Coordinating tasks across the application involves managing intertask dependencies, scheduling, and concurrency in the logical flow of your application. Amazon SWF gives you control over implementing tasks and coordinating them without worrying about underlying complexities such as tracking their progress and maintaining their state.

When using Amazon SWF, you implement workers to perform tasks. Workers can run either on cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), or on your own premises. You can create tasks that are long-running, or that may fail, time out, or require restarts—or that may complete with varying throughput and latency. Amazon SWF stores tasks and assigns them to workers when they are ready, tracks their progress, and maintains their state, including details on their completion.

To coordinate tasks, you write a program that gets the latest task state from Amazon SWF and uses that state to initiate subsequent tasks. Amazon SWF maintains an application's execution state durably, so your application is resilient to individual component failures. With Amazon SWF, you can build, deploy, scale, and modify application components independently.

Amazon SWF suits use cases that require coordination of tasks, including media processing, web application back-ends, business process workflows, and analytics pipelines.

Use Amazon SWF if your app’s steps take more than 500 milliseconds to complete, you need to track the state of processing, or you need to recover or retry if a task fails.

With SWF you can create distributed asynchronous systems as workflows.

Best suited for human-enabled workflows like an order fulfilment system or for procedural requests.

AWS recommends that for new applications customers consider AWS Step Functions instead of SWF.

⁠

Loading docs.aws.amazon.com⁠

⁠

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.