Amazon SWF distributed storage

Question

I'm writing on Amazon SWF and faced with the problem:

I need to keep some values in place that available for all execution parts of SWF

For example, I store the value in activity and want to read it in child workflow.

Of course I can use staff like memcache, but may be exist any standard mechanism from SWF to perform this?

Answer 1

If value is small an activity should return it to the workflow in its result and the workflow will pass it to the child workflow as a parameter. If value is large then you can store it somewhere (S3 for example) and pass around reference to it.

Answer 2

From the SWF documentation:

Maximum input/result data size: 32,000 characters

This limit affects activity or workflow execution result data, input data when scheduling activity tasks or workflow executions, and input sent with a workflow execution signal.

If the data you want to move between is bigger than this, than you will need to use an intermediate storage, for example S3.