Question

A retail company runs an order-fulfillment process as a chain of AWS Lambda functions: validate payment, reserve inventory, generate a shipping label, and send a confirmation. Currently each function invokes the next one directly, and when a step fails midway the team cannot easily see which step failed, retry only the failed step, or add compensating actions. They want a managed way to coordinate these steps with built-in error handling, retries, and visual tracking of each execution, while keeping the individual functions small and independent. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Step Functions to define a state machine that orchestrates the Lambda functions with retry, catch, and error-handling states.

Answer

Place an Amazon SQS queue between each Lambda function and rely on visibility timeouts to retry failed steps.

Answer

Combine all four operations into a single larger Lambda function so the entire workflow succeeds or fails as one unit.

Answer

Publish an Amazon SNS message after each Lambda completes so that the next function is triggered via a subscription.