Monday January 13th I was invited by AWS User Group Oslo to participate in the traditional AWS re:Invent re:Cap meetup. My re:Cap contribution was a reflection on recent and valuable features in AWS Step Functions which can make the developer experience simpler and more efficient, reducing the time from idea to business value.
Main topics of my re:Cap talk
- How to manage AWS Step Functions configuration with Infrastructure-as-Code
- Replacing application (Lambda) code with Step Functions workflow configuration
- Breaking apart a “Lambda-lith”
- Step Functions intrinsic functions
- New support for JSONata, in addition to JSONPath
- Walkthrough of JSONata native functionality
- New support for Variables
- Step Functions Distributed Map state
“Customers choose Step Functions to build complex workflows that involve multiple services such as AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, Amazon Bedrock, and HTTP API integrations. Within these workflows, you build states to interface with these various services, passing input data and receiving responses as output. While you can use Lambda functions for date, time, and number manipulations beyond Step Functions’ intrinsic capabilities, these methods struggle with increasing complexity, leading to payload restrictions, data conversion burdens, and more state changes. This affects the overall cost of the solution. You use variables and JSONata to address this.“
AWS Compute Blog: Simplifying developer experience with variables and JSONata in AWS Step Functions
Source material references this re:Cap talk was based upon are listed below.
Event highlights
Gunnar Grosch from AWS kicked off the event with highlights of new announcements from the pre:Invent and actual re:Invent period with a deeper dive on Amazon Aurora DSQL.
Then it was my turn before Colin from Capra Consulting shared his perception about the state of Platform Engineering.
The meetup wrapped up with an interesting panel discussion with Martin from Sopra Steria, Gunnar from AWS, Anders from Webstep and Erlend from Capra.
Many thanks to the organizers for a great event.
Slides from my re:Cap talk
Reference material
- AWS Step Functions
- AWS Compute Blog: Simplifying developer experience with variables and JSONata in AWS Step Functions/
- https://serverlessland.com/reinvent2024/api402
- https://serverlessland.com/reinvent2024/svs401
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2yQDdvlhXf_Ezjnq7A7LfHBgCYSqzrZS
- AWS Community re:Caps incl. full deck download