How To Build Better Orchestrations With AWS Step Functions, Task Tokens, And Amazon EventBridge!

Sheen Brisals
7 min readAug 26, 2021
Image by Gerhard G. from Pixabay

Working with Serverless often makes us feel like being part of a musical. There is orchestration, choreography, and in fact, serverless has its own musical and a folk song too!

Several patterns help us with serverless adoption. AWS Step Functions is often used to perform orchestration. Amazon EventBridge is helpful to choreograph multiple microservices, as discussed in my re:Invent talk below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcbnrJdNBRI

These are not rules but general practices. There will be variations and exceptions depending on individual use cases.

Loyalty Service Platform

Shown below is a high-level view of a Loyalty Service platform. It has a set of APIs, several set-piece microservices, and an external SaaS application.

These microservices are loosely coupled and communicate via custom events routed by EventBridge.

Picture showing the microservices of a Loyalty Service platform.
Loyalty Service Platform. Source Author

For our discussion, we will focus on the Order Processing and Vendor Mediator services. These two services, though decoupled…

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Sheen Brisals

Co-author of Serverless Development on AWS (O'Reilly, 2024) | Engineer. Architect. Leader. Writer. Speaker. AWS Serverless Hero.