Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF) is a web service that makes it easy to coordinate work across distributed application components.
Amazon SWF is used for processing background jobs that have parallel or sequential steps.
You can think of Amazon SWF as a fully managed state tracker and task coordinator.
Use Amazon SWF if your app’s steps take more than 500 milliseconds to complete, you need to track the state of processing, or you need to recover or retry if a task fails.
With SWF you can create distributed asynchronous systems as workflows.
Tracks the state of your workflow which you interact and update via API.
Best suited for human-enabled workflows like an order fulfilment system or for procedural requests.
AWS recommends that for new applications customers consider AWS Step Functions instead of SWF.