CLF-C02 Practice Question 127: Workflow Orchestration
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 13 · question 7 of 10
A lender automates its loan approval process. Each application must be validated by an AWS Lambda function, then sent to a credit-check service, then wait for a human underwriter to approve or reject it, which can take several days, and finally trigger a notification with the decision. Failed steps must be retried automatically, and staff want a visual view of where each application is in the process. Which service should coordinate this process?
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Answer:
AWS Step Functions lets you create *workflows* (state machines) made up of a series of steps, so you can orchestrate services such as Lambda in a specific order. It has built-in error handling with `Retry` and `Catch`, and it supports human-in-the-loop approval: using a callback with a task token, a workflow can pause until a person responds. Standard workflows can run for up to one year, which easily covers a wait of several days. The console lets you visualize each execution and see the state of every step.
Option A, Amazon SQS, queues messages between components. Someone would still have to write and maintain the sequencing, retry and waiting logic. Option B, EventBridge, routes events to targets and runs schedules, but it doesn't track a multi-step process with a visual view of each execution. Option C, Amazon SNS, sends notifications, so it could deliver the final decision, but it can't coordinate the steps before that.
Reference: What is Step Functions?