AWS Step Functions is a low-code, visual workflow service that developers use to build distributed applications, automate IT and business processes, and build data and machine learning pipelines using AWS services. Workflows manage failures, retries, parallelization, service integrations, and observability so developers can focus on higher-value business logic. Step Functions offers two workflow types - Standard or Express - that can be used depending on your specific use case. Standard Workflows are used to manage long-running workloads. Express Workflows support high-volume event processing workloads.

Typical use cases for AWS Step Functions include: (a) ensuring that long-running, multiple ETL jobs run in order and complete successfully, instead of manually orchestrating those jobs or maintaining a separate application; (b) combining multiple AWS Lambda functions into responsive serverless applications/microservices, orchestrating data, microservices, and services that run on Amazon EC2 instances, containers, or on-premises servers; (c) develop complex ML pipelines with SageMaker.