Amazon unveils cloud-workflow service

ZDNet writes.

The service, dubbed Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF), aims to speed up the development of cloud applications. For the enterprise, automating business processes for cash to order, finance and analytics can gobble up development time.

According to CRN, Amazon said the service, which is currently in beta, makes it easier to create applications that are distributed across multiple systems, and to co-ordinate processing across multiple systems, both of which can be costly and time-consuming.

“With Amazon SWF, developers can now easily co-ordinate distributed application components across on-premise and cloud environments using their choice of programming languages,” Reto Kramer, GM for Application Connection Services, AWS, said.

SWF comprises a 'decider', which co-ordinates the various 'tasks', logical units of computing work, by assigning them to 'workers', i.e. functional components of the underlying applications, Information Age says.

Customers will be able to use the service for free for up to 1 000 workflows and 10 000 tasks per month. Those workflows can be kept running for a total of 30 000 workflow-days (where one workflow active for one day is equal to one workflow-day), Amazon said.