Building multi-step applications on AWS has always required careful thought around state management, error handling, and coordination between services. If you’ve built workflows before, you know the drill. You end up writing retry logic, checkpointing progress in DynamoDB, guarding against duplicate executions, and managing infrastructure that has nothing to do with your actual business logic.
AWS Lambda durable functions change that. Launched at re:Invent 2025, durable functions extend the familiar Lambda programming model with built-in capabilities to checkpoint progress, automatically recover from failures, and suspend execution for up to one year, all without incurring compute charges during waits.
In this post, I’ll walk you through building a real multi-step application using Lambda durable functions. We’ll build a customer onboarding workflow that validates user data, sends a verification email, waits for the user to confirm, and then provisions their account. By the end, you’ll …
