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Cloud Business: Amazon Web Services Intros Amazon Simple Workflow Service

Amazon Web Services (News - Alert), an Amazon.com company, and a provider of cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, announced the availability of Amazon Simple Workflow Service or SWF.

As indicated, the new SWF service is a workflow service for building scalable, resilient applications. Whether automating business processes for finance or insurance applications, building sophisticated data analytics applications, or managing cloud infrastructure services, Amazon SWF is noted to reliably coordinate all of the processing steps within an application.

"With Amazon SWF, developers can now easily coordinate distributed application components across on-premises and cloud environments using their choice of programming languages," Reto Kramer, general manager, Application Connection Services, AWS, said in a press release.

"By relying on Amazon SWF to handle the coordination of distributed task execution, developers can now focus on building the differentiating aspects of their applications and leave the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building and managing workflow engines to AWS," Kramer added.

Amazon is of the opinion that traditional development approaches are both time-consuming and costly to build and track processing steps, which is always coupled with the risk of reliably and execution without duplication. Amazon believes that processing steps across those systems presents an added challenge. In this scenario, Amazon claims that its SWF allows developers to structure the various processing steps as it coordinates these tasks in a reliable and scalable manner.

Amazon SWF manages task execution dependencies, scheduling, and concurrency based on a developer's application logic. The service stores tasks, reliably dispatches them to application components, tracks their progress, and keeps their latest state.

In its release, Amazon also listed NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, Sage Bionetworks, RightScale as its new customers who have integrated Amazon SWF.

"With Amazon SWF managing the state of several data analytics pipelines, the concerns of workflow execution and the coordination of the distributed systems performing the work of the pipeline, are technical issues we just don't need to worry about," Michael Kellen, director of Technology and Software Development at Sage Bionetworks said in a statement.

Thorsten von Eicken, chief technology officer of RightScale, said that with Amazon SWF, the company is now able to reduce the time to market for its higher level infrastructure automation features.