Cloud Computing Press about Cloud Servers & Hosting & Related News

AWS Adds Simple Workflow Service to Its Wares

In a move up the proverbial stack, Amazon’s cloud now includes a Simple Workflow Service (SWF), or orchestration service, for building scalable, resilient, fault-tolerant, distributed applications that run both on-premise and/or in the cloud, blurring the distinction between them, a move that’s ultimately good for the cloud if it increases the enterprise’s comfort level with the cloud. Amazon imagines it being used for media processing, web application back-ends, business process automation, data analytics batch processing and of course migration to the cloud. It says it’s used internally for such things as MapReduce analytics for operational decision-making and managing user-facing content such as web pages, videos and Kindle books. According to AWS CTO Werner Vogels: “A growing number of applications are relying on asynchronous and distributed processing, with scalability of the application as the primary motivation. By designing autonomous distributed components, developers get the flexibility to deploy and scale out parts of the application independently as load increases. The asynchronous and distributed model has the benefits of loose coupling and selective scalability, but it also creates new challenges. Application developers must coordinate multiple distributed components to get the desired results. They must deal with the increased latency and unreliability inherent in remote communication. Components may take extended periods of time to complete tasks, requests may fail and errors originating from remote systems must be handled. Today, to accomplish this, developers are forced to write complicated infrastructure that typically involves message queues and databases along with complex logic to synchronize them. All this ‘plumbing’ is extraneous to business logic and makes the application code unnecessarily complicated and hard to maintain.

read more

Source: Latest News from Cloud Computing Journal | 22 Feb 2012 | 2:10 pm

---