AWS SQS trigger Step Functions

Question

Quick question: Is it possible to trigger the execution of a Step Function after an SQS message was sent?, if so, how would you specify it into the cloudformation yaml file?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The first think to consider is this: do you really need to use SQS to start a Step Functions state machine? Can you use API gateway instead? Or could you write your messages to a S3 bucket and use the CloudWatch events to start a state machine?

If you must use SQS, then you will need to have a lambda function to act as a proxy. You will need to set up the queue as a lambda trigger, and you will need to write a lambda that can parse the SQS message and make the appropriate call to the Step Functions StartExecution API.

I’m on mobile, so I can’t type up the yaml right now, but if you need it, I can try to update with it later. For now, here is detailed walkthrough of how to invoke a Step Functions state machine from Lambda (including example yaml), and here is walkthrough of how to use CloudFormation to set up SQS to trigger a Lambda.