Business workflows can extend beyond AWS. They can invoke legacy services deployed in on-premise systems and third party APIs. This chapter gives you an overview of how Step Functions integrates with services and systems outside AWS.

Third party API integration

With third party API integration, you can invoke any publicly available API such as Salesforce and Stripe in your workflows. This is accomplished by using a HTTP task state in your workflow. If your containerized workload is exposed as public API, you can use this integration to directly invoke them.

Activity Integration

Activities are a Step Functions feature that enables you to process messages by an external worker running in environments such as Amazon EKS, on-premise servers etc. You can think of activities as a managed queue where you can send tasks for external processing through an activity task, and these tasks can be consumed and processed by a remote worker running basically anywhere.

You will learn more about using Activities to integrate with workloads deployed outside AWS in the coming chapters.