Amazon SWS Streamlines Cloud Workflow Integration

Today on Tom's IT Pro: The Sliver Lining - Streamlining Workflow Integration in the Cloud with Amazon's Simple Workflow Service .

It is rare that a business application functions independently of other applications. Integrating a workflow system may be just what your company requires to help keep business processes running smoothly.

Workflow systems abstract the basic operations in a business process to run tasks and execute business logic. They are a viable alternative to writing custom scripts, a tried and true method that can-nonetheless-be error prone, time consuming, and difficult to scale.

In the latest post to his Tom’s IT Pro The Silver Lining blog, Dan Sullivan explains how workflow systems in general and, more specifically, Amazon’s Simple Workflow Service (SWS) could be the answer to your workflow needs.  Since it is a software as a service (SaaS), SWS allows IT not to have to deal with deployment and maintenance issues.

True, you will still have to select programs or write code “to execute specific steps within the workflow,” as Dan points out, “but SWS provides the workflow framework to coordinate the execution of those applications.

“SWS allows you to execute distributed processes using an abstraction of a workflow, which is a combination of coordination logic and activities. You register these coordination and activity programs with SWS through a management console,” Dan writes. “After that, you can execute the workflow as a single logical unit of work.”

In the story, Dan also provides examples of how a workflow systems can streamline your business processes.

See here to read Dan’s article and learn more about Amazon SWS.

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• The Stack is Dead, Long Live the Stack

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• Cloud Computing Lets Us Rethink How We Use Data

Inaugural post for Dan Sullivan's Tom's IT Pro "The Silver Lining" blog about Cloud Computing.

James Alan Miller is Managing Editor of Tom's IT Pro. He is a veteran technology journalist with over seventeen years of experience creating and developing magazine and online content. Founding editor of numerous business and enterprise computing sites at the internet.com network, James headed up the After Hours section at PC Magazine, as well as hardware and software sections of various Windows publications.

See here for all Tom's IT Pro articles written by James.