When to use Amazon SWF

Here are some scenarios where SWF can be used:

• When you have multiple tasks that need to be coordinated and executed in a specific sequence based on some dependency or in parallel
• When you have multiple application components and need to dispatch tasks to these application components
• When you have a distributed application and you need to coordinate and process tasks in a distributed application environment
• When you need to execute ordered application steps
• When you need to manage the application state during distributed execution
• When you need to reliably execute periodic tasks and audit the execution
• When you need to asynchronously execute event-driven tasks

Here are some SWF use cases:

• Media processing
• Customer-order-processing workflow
• Web application backend
• Business-process workflow
• Analytics pipelines

Now that we know what SWF is and what it can...