Serverless Platforms Bundle Workflow Orchestration
Inngest
The real pressure from hyperscalers is not that they build a better workflow tool, it is that they make orchestration feel free once a team is already deep in one cloud. Step Functions, Workflows, and Durable Functions are sold inside broader serverless stacks, so a team can wire Lambdas, Pub/Sub, Firestore, queues, or Azure Functions together on one bill with one IAM model and one ops surface, even if the workflow authoring experience is clunkier than a specialist product.
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AWS and Google both price orchestration at the step level, and Azure folds Durable Functions into Azure Functions consumption. That pushes buyers to compare total run cost, retries, logs, and adjacent service charges across one cloud account, not just the workflow product sticker price.
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The bundle is strongest when workflows mostly call native cloud services. AWS says Step Functions orchestrates 14,000 plus API actions across 220 plus AWS services, and Google Workflows connectors handle request formatting, retries, and long running operations for Google Cloud APIs.
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That leaves independents to win on portability and day to day developer ergonomics. Inngest can be self hosted, runs from a single CLI binary with local persistence by default, and has added Postgres support, which makes it easier to keep the same workflow layer across clouds or in regulated environments.
This market is heading toward a split. Basic background jobs and cloud native glue code will be absorbed by the platform, while independent tools move upmarket into multi cloud apps, AI pipelines, and regulated deployments where portability, observability, and faster iteration matter more than squeezing orchestration onto an existing cloud invoice.