Amazon Releases The Simple Workflow Service (SWF)
Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF) 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 reliably coordinates all of the processing steps within an application.
With traditional development approaches, it is both time-consuming and costly to build and track processing steps that run at different times and have different durations, while ensuring they are executed reliably and without duplication. When the execution of applications is distributed across multiple systems, the coordination of processing steps across those systems presents an added challenge. Using Amazon SWF, developers can structure the various processing steps in an application as “tasks” that drive work in distributed applications, and Amazon SWF 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.
Amazon SWF is a fully managed service, with no hardware or software to administer, scale, tune, patch or upgrade. Amazon SWF provides simple API calls that can be executed from code written in any language and run on your EC2 instances, or any of your machines located anywhere in the world that can access the Internet. On-premises machines can simply open an Internet connection to request tasks from SWF APIs, requiring no changes to firewall rules. Detailed reporting on the current status and execution history of your workflows is available through the AWS Management Console.
Sources: http://aws.amazon.com/swf/
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/02/Amazon-Simple-Workflow-Service.html
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