If you're in AWS, SWF and StepFunctions are great for starting and monitoring task completion / failure for long running processes, either interconnected or sin

If you're in AWS, SWF and StepFunctions are great for starting and monitoring task completion / failure for long running processes, either interconnected or single. You can write your own code to long poll in either and do work as it's needed, but with StepFunctions you can wrap lambdas to give a little more visibility and error handling.