Software workflows have been very popular and the preferred method to is break big tasks into sequential or parallel operational chunks depending on business requirements. Workflows mostly follow state machine concepts, where we have an orchestrator, execution steps in the form of states, and each state is executed through some events. Input/output and to/from states are managed by the orchestrator.
As defined by AWS, Amazon SWF helps developers to build, run, and scale background jobs that have sequential or parallel steps. It can be used in applications which need distributed asynchronous processing.
SWF web services help maintain the state of your workflow but they don't execute any software code, the logic of a workflow, or ...
