AWS AppFlow hopes to bring a SaaS revolution

AWS Office
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is looking to make the movement of data between its servers and SaaS applications more straightforward with the launch of an extensive new integration service.

Amazon AppFlow aims to make it easier for developers to move data between web servers and SaaS applications such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, Slack and Zendesk.

Transferring data from an application to a web server and back after performing analytics is often a tedious task for developers, who would rather prefer if they could manage this movement via flows - although AWS has taken care not to position it as a means to automate workflows.

The platform looks to compete with the likes of Microsoft Azure’s Power Automate, which also allows developers to manage data by triggering flows around events or at predefined times or specifically upon receiving requests. 

Unlike Automate, Amazon AppFlow focuses on moving data from applications to other AWS services for building in analytics. 

AppFlow launch

AWS says developers often spend long hours writing custom integrators to pass data between SaaS applications and AWS services so that it can be analyzed. This can be expensive and take months to complete and in case data requirements change, then costly and complicated modifications are required. 

“Companies that don’t have the luxury of engineering resources might find themselves manually importing and exporting data from applications, which is time-consuming, risks data leakage, and has the potential to introduce human error,” AWS principle advocate Martin Beeby told TechCrunch.

Every flow which is categorized by a call to the source application to transfer data to a destination would cost $0.001 per run with an associated data processing cost that starts off at $0.02 per GB.

At the moment, there are only 14 possible sources and four destinations that include Amazon Redshift and S3 in addition to Salesforce and Snowflake. It is fair to expect that over time these integrations would go up and so would the list of supported services.  

"Our customers tell us that they love having the ability to store, process, and analyze their data in AWS. They also use a variety of third party SaaS applications, and they tell us that it can be difficult to manage the flow of data between AWS and these applications,” added Kurt Kufeld, Vice President, AWS. 

“Amazon AppFlow provides an intuitive and easy way for customers to combine data from AWS and SaaS applications without moving it across the public Internet. With Amazon AppFlow, our customers bring together and manage petabytes, even exabytes, of data spread across all of their applications – all without having to develop custom connectors or manage underlying API and network connectivity.”

Via: TechCrunch

Jitendra Soni

Jitendra has been working in the Internet Industry for the last 7 years now and has written about a wide range of topics including gadgets, smartphones, reviews, games, software, apps, deep tech, AI, and consumer electronics.  

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