If you're a web developer, Amazon has created an exciting new product for you. Simple Workflow (SWF) is a service for building scalable, resilient applications and it makes creating and managing them much easier than it has been in the past. The service allows users to administer, scale, tune, patch and upgrade without any hardware or software. Amazon takes care of everything.
If you want to learn how to use Simple Workflow either with new applications or existing applications, Amazon is offering a brief seminar on Tuesday, March 13th. It will be held between 10 and 11am consisting of a 40 minute presentation followed by a brief Q&A session.
Here's a little about what Amazon promises with the service and functionality of the product:
Using Amazon SWF to manage workflows within your application is easy. The Amazon SWF service acts as the coordination hub for all of the different components of your application:
*Maintaining application state
*Tracking workflow executions and logging their progress
*Holding and dispatching tasks
*Controlling which tasks each of your application hosts will be assigned to execute
To use Amazon SWF you simply:
*Use the AWS Management Console or the Amazon SWF APIs to specify the names of workflows.
*Use the Amazon SWF APIs to “start” a new workflow, which results in a particular sequence of workflow tasks, called a “workflow execution,” being kicked into action.
*Use the Amazon SWF APIs from your worker machines (a "worker" is a component of your application which handles specific tasks) to establish the task order, manage conditional flows, and execute loops for a workflow execution.
*Use the Amazon SWF APIs from your worker machines to request and execute workflow tasks in the cloud or on premises.
*Monitor the status and progress of workflow executions and their associated tasks in the AWS Management Console.
Here are Service Highlights according to Amazon:
Simple - Amazon SWF replaces the complexity of custom-coded workflow solutions and process automation software with a fully managed web service. This eliminates the need for developers to manage the infrastructure plumbing of process automation so they can focus their energy on the unique functionality of their application.
Scalable - Amazon SWF seamlessly scales with your application’s usage. No manual administration of the workflow service is required as you add more workflows to your application or increase the complexity of your workflows.
Flexible - Amazon SWF lets you write your application components and coordination logic in any programming language and run them in the cloud or on-premises.
If You Are Interested:
It sounds like this could be a real time saver for a lot of developers. Hopefully it doesn't put anybody out of work. The best thing is that Amazon will do most of this work for free. You can get started right away with Simple Workflow or you can wait to take the webinar in mid March and learn more about it first.