FWIW, "Amazon EC2 Queue" actually covers a lot of real world use cases for SWF where a "queue" is needed to manage states and distribute works among workers. T

FWIW, "Amazon EC2 Queue" actually covers a lot of real world use cases for SWF where a "queue" is needed to manage states and distribute works among workers. The list is a bit out dated, and as for Amazon State Machines, it's a name more suited for AWS Step Functions, which is the successor of SWF (and defined as an actual state machine). Step Functions do cover lots of SWF use cases (rightfully so as a successor), but also more cases like service orchestration, etc.