Amazon Accidentally Leaks AWS Workflow Offering

Amazon had a content management snafu yesterday, accidentally revealing an as of yet unannounced workflow service for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon quickly removed the content, but not before observers took note of the new goodie.

Going with the Flow on AWS

AWS dominates the public cloud market and constantly releases new products to ensure their infrastructure-as-a-service remains a one-stop shop for everything developers need to build the cloud offering of their dreams. Therefore, it shouldn’t be too much of a shock that the cloud giant might be introducing a workflow service in the near future.

Yesterday the page that details the AWS free usage tier listed a new service, SWF, that stands for Simple Workflow. According to the posted details, the service will provide common workflow capabilities and allow users to schedule tasks, add markers and receive event signals. To encourages users to try the new plan, the following would be made free:

• first 1,000 executions,
• first 10,000 activity tasks, signals, timers and markers
• first 30,000 workflow-days

The new service is a logical compliment to other AWS services like Amazon’s Simple Queue Service and Simple Notification Service that enable users to build near real-time event driven systems.

Getting More Information

There are no additional details available at this time. Amazon has not elected to provide additional details about the service or its potential release date. The service was only listed briefly on the AWS site before the company removed all details. We will of course be watching to see when the not-so-secret new service is revealed.