The Core State Types: Task, Choice, Parallel, Map

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The building blocks every Step Functions workflow is composed from.

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Key points

  • Task: does the actual work, often a Lambda invocation or a direct AWS service SDK call
  • Choice: native conditional branching based on the state's input
  • Parallel: runs multiple independent branches simultaneously, waits for all to finish
  • Map: runs the same steps once per item in an input array, concurrently or sequentially