States

In AWS Step Functions, states represent individual steps or tasks in a workflow. They are the building blocks of a state machine, and each state has a specific purpose and behavior. There are several types of states available in AWS Step Functions, each designed for different use cases. In the previous lesson, we learned about the Task State, which we used to invoke the Lambda function.

Let's learn more about all possible states:

Task

A Task state represents a single unit of work performed by a state machine, typically invoking a Lambda function, an activity worker, or interacting with another AWS service.

Analogy: Think of a Task state as a worker in a factory assembly line, performing a specific job.

Example: Invoke a Lambda function to process data, send an email using Amazon SES, or add an item to a DynamoDB table.

Task states can receive input data from the previous state and pass output data to the next state. Task states can be configured with error-handling options to manage failures or exceptions during execution. By defining Catch and Retry clauses, we can handle different types of errors, specifying how the state machine should proceed in case of a failure, and configuring retries with customizable back-off strategies. Task states allow us to set TimeoutSeconds and HeartbeatSeconds to control the duration and monitoring of task executions. TimeoutSeconds sets the maximum allowed time for a task to complete, while HeartbeatSeconds is used to monitor the progress of long-running tasks by ...