AWS Launches AppFlow, A New Tool For Managing The Flow Of Data

Amazon Web Services has launched Amazon AppFlow, a new tool for managing the flow of data from AWS to software-as-a-service applications.

Martin Beeby, the principal developer advocate at AWS, wrote in a blog post on the announcement. In essence, Amazon AppFlow has been designed to remove the requirement for developers to manually configure connectors that enable them to transfer data between AWS and third-party services like Salesforce, Slack, Trend Micro and Zendesk. AppFlow instead integrates directly with SaaS applications and automatically enables secure, bidirectional data flow between them.

According to the website — “Amazon AppFlow is a fully managed integration service. AppFlow enables you to securely transfer data between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications like Salesforce, Marketo, Slack, and ServiceNow, and AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift, in just a few clicks. With AppFlow, you can run data flows at nearly any scale at the frequency you choose - on a schedule, in response to a business event, or on-demand.”

Considering AppFlow integrated directly with SaaS applications, that means it allows data to flow from SaaS applications to AWS, it can send data from AWS to SaaS applications.

The company blog explains the announcement and describes how it works.

According to Kurt Kufeld, the vice president of AWS, Amazon AppFlow provides an easy way for customers to combine data from AWS and SaaS applications without moving it across the public internet.

He said, “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.”

He explained further — Traditionally, building connectors between multiple applications is labour-intensive and time-consuming, requiring developers to create streams of custom code that often takes hours – if not days. This is particularly difficult for organisations that wish to connect up data from various pools and silos, which are often presented in disparate data formats. This leaves developers with a mess of custom codes and connectors which, as AWS notes, is expensive to maintain.

Beeby said, “Developers spend huge amounts of time writing custom integrations so they can pass data between SaaS applications and AWS services so that it can be analysed; these can be expensive and can often take months to complete.”

Additionally, Amazon AppFlow allows the customer to configure multiple types of ‘triggers’ for transferring data in just a couple of clicks, saving them time and costs associated with waiting for IT teams to complete integration projects. AWS has stated that there are no upfront charges or fees to use Amazon AppFlow, and customers only pay for the number of flows they run and the volume of data processed.