Event-driven pipelines built with custom retry logic and Lambda-to-Lambda calls get messy to debug. I wanted to see how Step Functions handled the orchestration layer instead.
The result is a distributed order fulfillment system where API Gateway receives orders, Step Functions coordinates validation and storage, and SQS handles fulfillment processing with automatic error recovery. Dead letter queues catch failures. The entire pipeline is defined as infrastructure code.
What I learned: Step Functions visual workflows are genuinely useful for debugging distributed systems, but the real value is in the built-in retry and error handling, not the visualization. The discipline of externalizing orchestration logic from your Lambda functions is worth adopting even when the tooling overhead feels steep.