AWS Step Functions Reviews & Product Details

What I like most about AWS Step Functions is that it allows you to model complex workflows visually and in a controlled manner, without having to handle all the orchestration logic manually in code. It is especially useful for coordinating processes between various AWS services, such as Lambda, Glue, EventBridge, and other components of the ecosystem. I also greatly value the traceability of executions, error handling, retries, and the ability to define more robust and maintainable flows. For batch processes, automations, and data pipelines, it provides a lot of order and operational visibility. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like the least is that, although the visual design helps a lot, the flows can become difficult to maintain when they grow significantly in complexity. In large scenarios, the definition in JSON can become extensive and less convenient to manage. There is also an initial learning curve to fully understand states, transitions, error handling, and service limits. Additionally, when a workflow depends on several external services or permission configurations, troubleshooting can take time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I liked how AWS Step Functions have a detailed execution flow for each of my other AWS resources., also I liked the feature of how without the help of lambda I can quickly call Dynamodb and do the operation, this helps in reducing resources and saving some bucks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

So far not but earlier sometimes put a little more effort into writing step definitions thanks to WorkFlow Studio, the features to drag and drop AWS resources are pretty easy to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is easy to create an ETL flow in this service. It provides a feature to create workflow visually; in the back-end, it makes the whole JSON according to the visually prepared flow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The one of states provided in creating the flow is parallel state in which we can run multiple states simultaneously. But the drawback of this state is that if one of the entities fail, all the other entities included are aborted. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The way we can utilize the state machines to reduce the load on lambda functions. By creating a proper flow between state machines we can handle multiple lambas at once and achieve our goal efficiently. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Only thing is we need to learn the state language which i think is new and not useful anywhere other than here. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's a low code workflow tool by AWS; we used the Step function to orchestrate the business process, which should run on the AWS cloud when a file is uploaded to S3 storage. We liked it as of use; you can have many connectors or AWS lambda functions as input/output. The output of a step can be quickly sent to another one. 100's of Connectors can be easily added via drag n drop. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

To be more proficient in the AWS step function, you should have a good command of the AWS Services & AWS ecosystem, so there is some learning curve involved for a novice developer. No offline/on-prem IDE's available to develop & deploy the AWS Step functions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ability to integrate various AWS services for orchestration purposes, its visual workflow design is very easy to use to automate pipelines in the AWS environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Aws service quotas with step functions sometimes break the whole design of the processes when there is large data processing or several jobs increase or the need to implement more parallelism increases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The best thing about step functions is it allows me to focus on building business logic and less time on integration code as it takes care of all internal application components. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are few limits on AWS Step functions as AWS manages them. It only allows to move of data of 256KB through workflows, and 90 days of execution history is retained, which is much less compared to its competitor. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ability to run multiple AWS functions into a series of steps or flow so the step functions can make a sort of like a mini-application. I used it to replica live database into the analytics database for an hourly update of analytics database and it was really easy to write a couple of lambda functions each of which did a different step job and then using step functions to align them to run in a flow and notify me in case of any failure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The step functions console could be more user friendly to include step by step guide of creating step-functions rapidly. That would help me create and use a new step function every day instead of taking time and motivation to create a step function due to the efforts required. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Our workflow requires a lot of tasks to be executed sequentially, and AWS Step Function provides a very structural and logical way for us to coordinate our tasks. On top of that, the way you can integrate some logic into Step Function process makes it easy to execute parallel, conditional and loop tasks if required.

AWS Step Function also works nicely with other AWS services such as AWS Lambda, and integrated nicely with IAM role in controlling the permission. Another positive note is that the logical diagram after the Step Function has been created provides a good visual feedback, and it allows us to monitor success / failure of a certain step much easily compare to monitoring from the logs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One thing I dislike, or I hope it will be part of the future offering is the ability to retry the Step Function at any selected task / step and continue from there. As of now we can create this behavior by having a conditional check at the beginning of the Step Function process, hope that this can be part of the feature in the future. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Step Functions are perfect to implement stateful behavior while using stateless workers (lambdas). It's fairly easy to have conditional operations or operations on array-like inputs. This makes Step Functions very powerful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The main downside of Step Functions (aside from the vendor lock in, but if you're using AWS Lambda you have already accepted it) is the language you describe them in. While AWS gives you some tools to inspect your Step Function's shape, the Amazon State Language could have been designed better. When the state machine logic becomes non-trivial, the state machine definition grows in number of lines rapidly, rendering very difficult to maintain and modify state machines on the long run. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.