What's new with AWS Step Functions?

In this talk, we will dive deep on Step Functions and discuss some of the more exciting, recent releases that came out in the last few weeks. Step Functions is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful and flexible building blocks on the AWS platform and we are very excited to share a few learnings on how to best use the service and what pitfalls to avoid. We will include several quick demo's and practical examples of how we use Step Functions at our company.

Transcript

1. Marek Kuczyński Serverless Engineer @ Stedi Twitter: @marekq What's new with AWS Step Functions?

2. @marekq In this session… • About Stedi • What are Step Functions? • Why are they so exciting? • Practical tips and tricks • Q&A
3. About Stedi • Stedi is rebuilding the technological backbone of the B2B economy. • Trillions of dollars fl ow annually through a global network of commerce via an archaic framework called EDI. • Our goal is to make B2B transactions easier and more accessible. Orders Invoices Orders Invoices Retailer Distribution Producer
4. @marekq How we make EDI easier to use Source: https://edi.stedi.com/inspector
5. @marekq Why do we like serverless at Stedi? • The EDI business is very event driven by nature • We o ff er a “pay as you go” model for services to our customers • AWS services improve over time and new features are added • It’s really nice to have 0 instances to worry about!!
6. @marekq Let’s talk about Step Functions 6
7. @marekq What are AWS Step Functions? • AWS Step Functions is a low-code visual work fl ow service • Allows you to control which step should execute when in a work fl ow. • You can easily add retries, branches, choice states, parallel states etc. • A cool AWS example; https://github.com/ aws-samples/lambda-refarch- imagerecognition
8. @marekq How Marek uses Step Functions For my blog at https://www.coldstart.dev Source: https://github.com/marekq/rss-lambda
9. @marekq Three exciting new features 9
10. @marekq #1 - The new Workflow Studio Let me just show you… 10
11. @marekq #2 - Step Functions direct AWS SDK Integration • You can make direct API requests to over 200 AWS services now! • A few examples; • Read a record from a DynamoDB table • Upload a new JSON object to a S3 bucket • Put an event to EventBridge or SNS • You can o ff l oad the logic for the requests to Step Functions directly https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/09/aws-step-functions-200- aws-sdk-integration/
12. @marekq What changed? Now: Lambda for some tasks Before: Lambda for everything * 12
13. @marekq
14. @marekq Getting a DynamoDB record using CDK That’s it, no Lambda function required! Getting a DynamoDB record using CDK 14
15. @marekq Making any other SDK request to AWS 15
16. @marekq Creating a State Machine in CDK Full CDK sample: https://github.com/marekq/cdk-api-stepfunction 16
17. @marekq #3 - Monitoring your workflows became easier • X-Ray tracing can be enabled with one line in CDK. • You can con fi gure CloudWatch logging for all events. • Express Step Function captures several helpful metrics.
18. @marekq What’s next?
19. @marekq Thanks!