Uber recently open sourced Cadence, which is similar to AWS SWF [1] and built by the same principal engineer. A good overview was presented at Data @ Scale [2] if you're interested. Under the covers, it manages a set of queues for you and lets you write procedural business logic in a resilient way as an implicit workflow.

[1] https://github.com/uber/cadence [2] https://atscaleconference.com/videos/cadence-microservice-ar...