Simple Work Flow (SWF)

Orchestration for coordination and management of activity execution.

Essentials

• Fully-managed "workflow" orchestration service provided by AWS

• A workflow allows an architect/developer to implement distributed, asynchronous applications as a work flow

• A workflow coordinates and manages the execution of activities that can be run asynchronously across multiple computing devices

• SWF has consistent execution

• Guarantees the order in which tasks are executed

• There are no duplicate tasks

• The SWF service is primarily an API which an application can integrate it's workflow service into. This allows the service to be used by non-AWS services, such as an on-premise data center

• A workflow execution can last up to 1 year!

Components

• Starter: Starts the workflow

• Workflow: A sequence of steps required to perform a specific taskk.

  • A workflow is also commonly referred to as a decider

• Activities: A single step (or unit of work) in the workflow

• Tasks: What interacts with the "workers" that are part of a workflow

  • Activity task - tell the worker to perform a function

  • Decision task - tells the decider the state of the work flow execution, which allows the decider to determine the next activity to be performed

• Worker: Responsible for receiving a task and taking action on it

  • Can be any type of component such as an EC2 instance, or even a person.

AWS Flow Framework for Java

• Simplifies working with SWF by providing objects and classes

DO the sample workflow in the AWS Console!