Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF)

Yesterday the retail and cloud behemoth Amazon made an announcement regarding a new service that they're offering for developers called Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF).

Now I don't often write about public cloud offerings (in fact I may never have done it), and I wouldn't consider myself a developer in the traditional sense but I thought that this was noteworthy. Normally I write about virtualisation infrastructures / technologies but what's interesting about this is that it's clearly targeted at enabling complex and / or large applications to run in Amazon's cloud offerings.

Amazon's own CTO, Werner Vogels, describes SWF as:

an orchestration service for building scalable distributed applications

Some of the possible applications of SWF that Amazon mention are:

• Automating business processes for finance or insurance applications
• Building sophisticated data analytics applications
• Managing cloud infrastructure services

But there are bound to be others. Read Werner's blog post that fleshes out SWF's aims and purpose a little more. For now, I'm going to sit back and listen to what the AWS (Amazon Web Services) people are up to.