AWS Systems Manager now supports taking action for Automation step failure by allowing branching to another step within the Automation Document. This feature allows customers to perform graceful exits, send notifications, and a variety of clean up actions when an automation step fails. For example, when an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) update automation step fails midway, the customer can now call for automation to take a snapshot, close the EC2 instance, notify admin, and exit gracefully. Previously, there were only two choices, “Continue” and “Abort” upon failure of a step.