SYSTEM Cited by 3 sources
AWS Step Functions¶
What it is¶
AWS Step Functions is AWS's managed serverless workflow / state-machine service. Workflows are defined declaratively in Amazon States Language (ASL); steps invoke Lambda, AWS service integrations, or other Step Functions; failure/retry/catch/parallel constructs are first-class. Billed per state-transition.
Role in account-per-tenant lifecycle¶
ProGlove uses Step Functions as the account-creation orchestrator:
"Account creation is a fully automated process using AWS Step Functions, but the retirement and closure of accounts are performed manually through regularly run scripts." (Source: sources/2026-02-25-aws-6000-accounts-three-people-one-platform)
The Step Functions state machine wraps the multi-step account-provisioning flow: create account via Organizations → wait for account activation → apply baseline CloudFormation stacks (networking, IAM roles, logging, tagging, etc.) → register with StackSets as a new target → seed tenant-specific data → notify platform tooling.
The choice of Step Functions for this specific workflow — and plain scripts for retirement — is the architectural signal: the criterion for adoption is overhead introduced, not dogma. Step Functions shines where there are async waits, per-step retries, and observable progress. Retirement is a batch cleanup that runs regularly and doesn't need the state-machine scaffolding.
Stub page — general Step Functions internals (ASL semantics, Express vs Standard workflow, service-integration patterns) out of scope.
Seen in¶
- sources/2026-02-25-aws-6000-accounts-three-people-one-platform — canonical instantiation of patterns/automate-account-lifecycle: Step Functions drives account creation; scripts handle account retirement.
- sources/2026-02-26-aws-santander-catalyst-platform-engineering — the cloud process orchestration workload on Santander Catalyst migrates "legacy workflows to AWS Step Functions" with "retry patterns and error handling" + "centralized process monitoring". Step Functions is the modernization target for legacy batch / workflow engines in regulated-enterprise settings — its retry/catch/parallel primitives replace hand-rolled state machines.
- sources/2026-04-01-aws-automate-safety-monitoring-with-computer-vision-and-generative-ai — two Step Functions workflows in the CV-safety pipeline: (1) GT Job creation triggered by EventBridge on configurable cadence, orchestrates SageMaker Ground Truth labeling jobs + post-processing Lambdas; (2) hourly tape-labeling preparation — identifies newly-onboarded cameras, analyses multiple time- shifted frames + object-detection predictions via voting mechanism, stitches clear regions into composite images showing unobstructed floor tapes for annotation.