A real video pipeline is a directed acyclic graph with retries, audit, and partial-success semantics — not three Lambdas hand-stitched in glue code. These pieces argue for and design around the DAG as the unit of work: declarative workflow definitions that the runtime executes, automatic per-stage retry classification, deterministic partial-success on ABR ladders, and audit trails that drop out as a natural consequence of the graph structure. For engineers tired of rebuilding the same orchestration layer.