I gave a presentation titled "AWS Step Functions: Breaking Through the Wall of Large-Scale Parallelism" at JAWS SONIC 2026 & MIDNIGHT JAWS 2026 #jawsug #jawssonic2026

This is Kasahara from the Data Business Division.

I gave a presentation titled "Overcoming the Walls of Large-Scale Parallelism in AWS Step Functions" at "JAWS SONIC 2026 & MIDNIGHT JAWS 2026," a 24-hour online streaming event held from Saturday, September 5, 2026, 12:00 to Sunday, September 6, 2026, 12:00.

I presented as the Niigata chapter at the very beginning of the event, starting at 13:00 on Saturday, September 5, 2026.

Presentation Materials

Summary of Content

This time, I put together a summary of how to overcome the common walls encountered when performing large-scale parallel processing with Step Functions, as a mindset for tackling such challenges.

I myself use Step Functions frequently and struggle with configuring large-scale state machines. I wrote this drawing from my own experience as well.

• Standard event history: 25,000 events
  • Split state machines into nested structures
• Input/output payload size: 256 KiB
  • Use JSONPath / JSONata to narrow down and pass only the necessary values
• Making good use of the Map state
  • Use Distributed Map for simple processing / leverage the regular Map state for complex processing
• Increasing concurrency shifts the bottleneck to downstream service quota walls
  • Pay attention to the quotas of services called from Step Functions
  • Control effectively with MaxConcurrency

I think keeping these points in mind is the way to go when building large-scale parallel workflows with Step Functions.