Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF)

Amazon Simple Workflow (Amazon SWF) is a task coordination and state management service for cloud applications. With Amazon SWF, you can stop writing complex glue-code and state machinery and invest more in the business logic that makes your applications unique.

Our APIs, ease-of-use libraries, and control engine give developers the tools to coordinate, audit, and scale applications across multiple machines – in the Amazon web Services Cloud and other data centers. Whether automating business processes for finance applications, building big-data systems, or managing cloud infrastructure services, Amazon SWF helps you develop applications with processing steps that are resilient to failure – steps that can be scaled independent of each other and be audited even when they touch many different systems.

Using Amazon SWF, you structure the various processing steps in an application that runs across one or more machines as a set of “tasks.” Amazon SWF manages dependencies between the tasks, schedules the tasks for execution, and runs any logic that needs to be executed in parallel. The service also stores the tasks, reliably dispatches them to application components, tracks their progress, and keeps their latest state.

As your business requirements change, Amazon SWF makes it easy to change application logic without having to worry about the underlying state machinery, task dispatch, and flow control, and like other Amazon Web  Services, you only pay for what you use.