What will I learn?

  • What is the Step Functions service and when to use it.

  • How to chain Lambda functions together as a workflow.

  • How to trigger Step Functions using API Gateway and CloudWatch Events.

  • Monitoring and debugging Step Functions.

  • How to wait for human input using activities.

  • Callback patterns.

  • Blue-green deployments..

  • Best practices

  • Design patterns.

  • All the latest features such as Nested Workflows, Express Workflows and Dynamic Parallelism.

What the students say


Course curriculum

  • 1

    Introduction

    • Welcome

    • About the instructor

    • Before you start...

  • 2

    Step Functions 101

    • What is Step Functions?

    • What is Step Functions - useful links

    • A tour of the Step Functions console

    • When to use Step Functions?

    • 7 types of states

    • Managing execution state

    • Error handling

    • Error handling - useful links

    • Monitoring and debugging

    • Service limits

    • Service limits - useful links

    • Express workflows

    • AWS PrivateLink

  • 3

    Building state machines

    • Serverless framework and Step Functions

    • Chaining function calls

    • Retry

    • Catch

    • Branching

    • Parallel tasks

    • Waiting

    • Using Pass state to modify execution state

    • Map

    • Express workflows

  • 4

    Triggers

    • API Gateway

    • API Gateway - useful links

    • CloudWatch Event

    • CloudWatch Event - useful links

  • 5

    Activities

    • What are activities?

    • Using activities in Step Functions

    • Configuring activities in serverless.yml

    • Configuring activities in serverless.yml - useful links

  • 6

    Other AWS services

    • SNS

    • SQS

    • DynamoDB

  • 7

    Callbacks

    • What are callbacks?

    • Configuring callbacks in serverless.yml

  • 8

    Nested Workflows

    • What are nested workflows?

    • Configuring nested workflows in serverless.yml

  • 9

    Blue-Green Deployments

    • Why do we need blue-green deployments?

    • Implementing blue-green deployment in serverless.yml

  • 10

    Best Practices

    • Best Practices

  • 11

    Design Patterns

    • try-catch

    • recursion

    • sagas

    • de-dupe

    • semaphores

  • 12

    Wrap up

    • More resources for you

    • Before you go...

Step Functions 101

What is the Step Functions service and when to use it. How to orchestrate workflows using Lambda and Step Functions.

Design Patterns

Learn about design patterns such as the Saga pattern to manage distributed transactions.

Not just Lambda

Learn how to integrate Step Functions with other AWS services directly. How to trigger executions using API Gateway and CloudWatch Events.

Tools

Learn how to work with Step Functions with the Serverless framework as well as the AWS console.

Meet Yan Cui, your instructor

AWS Serverless Hero

Hi, my name is Yan Cui. I'm an AWS Serverless Hero and the instructor of this course. I'm also the author of Production-Ready Serverless by Manning and a regular speaker at user groups and conferences internally.

I am an experienced engineer and have run production workload on AWS for 10 years. I have been an architect and principal engineer with a variety of industries ranging from banking, e-commerce, sports streaming to mobile gaming. I have worked extensively with AWS Lambda in production and have been helping clients around the world adopt AWS and serverless as an independent consultant.