Integrating asynchronous AWS services with an AWS Step Functions state machine, presents a challenge when building serverless applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Services such as Amazon Translate, Amazon Macie, and Amazon Bedrock Data Automation (BDA) excel at handling long-running operations that can take more than 10 minutes to complete because of their asynchronous nature. Asynchronous services return an immediate 200 OK response, indicating that the request has succeeded, upon job submission (see the API response syntax of StartTextTranslationJob in Amazon Translate, CreateClassificationJob in Macie, and InvokeDataAutomationAsync in BDA), rather than waiting for the actual task completion and results.
In this post, we explore using AWS Step Function state machine with asynchronous AWS services, look at some scenarios where the processing time can be unpredictable, explain when traditional solutions such as polling (periodically check) fall short, and…
