When Amazon announced the release of DynamoDB, I argued that it was their first step towards joining the PaaS game in its next iteration.
I am completely clueless on where Amazon is going but if Amazon has a plan for PaaS (which I am sure they have because PaaS is the future of Cloud Services), DynamoDB is the first step for them to enter the game in the next iteration of PaaS. If their agility in the cloud market is any indication, they may even iterate PaaS to the next generation much before other players. Of course, Salesforce and IBM are trying to do the same coming from the application side of the things. We will have to wait and see who gets the next version of PaaS first.
If DynamoDB was the first step to building next gen platform service, today’s release of Simple Workflow Service is the next critical piece to the puzzle. This powerful orchestration tool could turn out to be the most powerful part of Amazon next-gen platform toolkit.
According to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels,
Today AWS launched an exciting new service for developers: the Amazon Simple Workflow Service. Amazon SWF is an orchestration service for building scalable distributed applications. Often an application consists of several different tasks to be performed in particular sequence driven by a set of dynamic conditions. Amazon SWF makes it very easy for developers to architect and implement these tasks, run them in the cloud or on premise and coordinate their flow. Amazon SWF manages the execution flow such that the tasks are load balanced across the registered workers, that inter-task dependencies are respected, that concurrency is handled appropriately and that child workflows are executed.
If anyone thinks after today’s announcement that Amazon has no clue for the future dominated by PaaS, I think they are fooling themselves. By now, it is pretty obvious how Amazon is approaching the platform game and with this announcement, they are clearly showing their cards. Game on!!
Update: Here is Jeff Barr’s post on the announcement
The workflow component is quote a big piece of a puzzle. For instance if you want to know create a complex work flow like an order system. You only need to program up a couple of semi-dumb forms which connect to the API. You don’t need to maintain code to manage states and failovers and tons of other stuff. It is really a cool idea.
[...] Avenue believes SWF is a major part of Amazon’s future strategy: If anyone thinks after today’s announcement that Amazon has no clue for the future dominated by [...]
Hey Krish –
This is the second article I’ve read that referred to SWF as Amazon’s second step to PaaS. To be fair to AWS, it’s worth mentioning their current stack includes: SimpleDB,their pub/sub engine Simple Notification Service, Simple Queue Service, orchestration with CloudFormation, ElastiCache, Relational Database Service, Elastic Beanstalk and Elastic MapReduce. Many don’t want to admit it, but it’s the most widely used PaaS stack out there today – and arguably, the richest.
DynamoDB & SWF are great services but represent a small portion of their platform stack.
Jeff
(BTW, I don’t include ELB, IAM or CloudWatch as Platform Services; i know some do…)
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