Question

Which workflows are supported by AWS Step Functions? (Select THREE).

A. Update inventory and initiate shipment when a customer purchases an item on an ecommerce site
B. Send messages to multiple Amazon EC2 instances when a file is created or modified in a Amazon S3 bucket
C. Consolidate data from multiple databases into unified reports
D. Notify a group of email addresses when the costs for an AWS account exceed a threshold.
E. Deploy different kinds of infrastructure that are based on variables
F. Coordinate multi-step analytics and machine learning workflows

Answer 1

AWS Step Functions can orchestrate a variety of workflows, including updating inventory and shipment initiation upon e-commerce purchases, data consolidation into reports, and machine learning workflow coordination. It is best for application workflow orchestration rather than infrastructure provisioning or simple notification tasks.

Step-by-step explanation:

AWS Step Functions is a serverless orchestration service that enables you to coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows. When considering the workflows that are supported by AWS Step Functions, it's essential to understand that it can manage both sequential and parallel processes, as well as handle error checking and retries for resilient operations.

The following workflows are supported by AWS Step Functions:

1. Update inventory and initiate shipment when a customer purchases an item on an e-commerce site - Orchestration of multiple services like AWS Lambda to update inventory and AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS) to initiate shipment.
2. Consolidate data from multiple databases into unified reports - Aggregating data across various sources and running data transformations if necessary using services like AWS Glue or AWS Lambda.
3. Coordinate multi-step analytics and machine learning workflows - Managing data preprocessing, analysis, and postprocessing steps in an ML pipeline.

Workflows such as sending messages to Amazon EC2 instances based on Amazon S3 events and notifying a list of email addresses when AWS costs exceed a threshold are possible with other AWS services, but these tasks don't illustrate the orchestration capabilities of AWS Step Functions in the context of the options provided.

Lastly, for deploying different kinds of infrastructure based on variables, AWS CloudFormation or Terraform might be better suited than AWS Step Functions, which is tailored for coordinating applications workflows rather than provisioning infrastructure.