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3 Pitfalls of AWS Step Functions and How You Can Avoid Them
Step Functions is an incredible workflow service from AWS. But if you’re not careful, you might get in over your head and find yourself struggling to do routine maintenance.
Last week I got a call asking for help with a nasty bug in production.
The bug dealt with processing data at a scale the dev team hadn’t anticipated. They were using [Step Functions](https://aws.amazon.com/step-functions/) to orchestrate a workflow that took an array of objects, processed them, and shoved the transformed objects into DynamoDB.
On the surface, it sounds like a pretty standard workflow — literally what Step Functions was designed to do. But upon closer inspection, we realized we were running into the [max request size limit](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/step-functions/latest/dg/limits-overview.html#service-limits-task-executions) of 256KB because the array was so large.
Debugging the issue took significantly longer than expected because we continuously had to trigger a workflow and wait for it to finish. It was taking 15+ minutes every run because of the amount of items being processed.
