Continuing Long-running Workflow Executions as a New Execution

Amazon Step Functions is designed to run workflows that have a finite duration and number of steps. Executions have a maximum duration of one year, and a maximum of 25,000 events (see Quotas).

For long-running executions, to avoid reaching the hard quota of 25,000 entries in the execution event history, we recommend that you start a new workflow execution directly from the Task state of a state machine. This allows you to break your workflows into smaller state machines, and to continue your ongoing work in a new execution. To start these workflow executions, call the StartExecution API action from your Task state and pass the necessary parameters.

Alternatively, you can also implement a pattern that uses a Lambda function to start a new execution of your state machine to split ongoing work across multiple workflow executions.

This tutorial shows you both the approaches to continue workflow executions without exceeding service quotas.