Amazon released AppFlow to help developers gain meaningful insights from data that is now living in lots of different places. According to the company, SaaS application adoption is increasing rapidly, and it is becoming very complex for developers to access the data from these applications.
“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,” Martin Beeby, principal advocate for AWS, stated in a blog post. “If data requirements change, then costly and complicated modifications have to be made to the integrations.”
To solve these issues, Amazon AppFlow was designed to automate the data flows between AWS services and SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and ServiceNow.
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Users can transform and process the data by combining fields to calculate new values, filter records to reduce noise, mask sensitive data to ensure privacy, and validate field values to cleanse the data, according to Beeby. They can also configure multiple types of triggers for their data flows, including one-time on-demand transfers, routine data syncs scheduled at pre-determined times, or event-driven transfers when launching a campaign within just a few clicks on the console.
This allows application admins, business analysts, and BI specialists to implement most of the integrations they need without waiting for IT to finish integration projects. It also allows data to flow from SaaS applications to AWS service with data encryption while in motion.
Amazon AppFlow also works with AWS PrivateLink to route data flows through the AWS network instead of over the public Internet to provide stronger data privacy and security.
“The service automatically scales up or down to meet the demands you place on it, it also allows you to transfer 100GB in a single flow which means you don’t need to break data down into batches,” Beeby wrote.
Amazon AppFlow now has support for S3 and 13 SaaS applications as sources of data, and S3, Amazon Redshift, Salesforce, and Snowflake as destinations, and Amazon plans on adding hundreds more.
“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,” said Kurt Kufeld, vice president for 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.”
