Launched December 2025 and available in Sydney. It solves a real pain of mine: tuning SQS visibility timeouts and DLQs so a flaky third step doesn't rerun the first two. Worth a pilot.
Use it when
- A job has several steps calling flaky services, and a failure shouldn't rerun the steps that already succeeded.
Don't use it when
- A single-step job: SQS + Lambda is cheaper and simpler.
- An SQS-triggered run that would exceed 15 minutes in total.
Pricing
Example: 1M runs a month of receive → enrich via a flaky API → write Postgres → notify ≈ $47, vs ~$10 for SQS + one Lambda (where a failure reruns every step) and ~$110 for Step Functions Standard.
Gotchas, with fixes
Gotcha: Whether retries are billed as extra operations isn't verified.
Fix: Pilot on one workload and read the bill before rolling out.
Provisioning
Official Pulumi package · Official Terraform provider
Configured on the Lambda function in @pulumi/aws (verify the exact properties before use).
Instead, consider
- Amazon SQS Simple one-step jobs.
- AWS Step Functions Never, for me.
Where it fits
- Background jobs and retries: Pick 04.
Watching, for multi-step jobs with flaky dependencies.
Sources
Last reviewed by Nicolas Dao