Hot topics

    • news

    Comment

    Is Amazon Web Services’ ‘SWF’ A New Workflow Manager?

    Leena Rao

    View Staff Page

    Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

    Thursday, February 9th, 2012
    Comments
    AWS Free Usage Tier-3

    It looks like Amazon Web Services may be launching a new workflow manager called SWF. First spotted by TechCrunch reader Michael Hood, SWF is listed as a service under AWS’ Free Usage Tier. Unfortunately, clicking on SWF takes you to a ’404′ page.

    Upon further digging, it looks like SWF stands for ‘Amazon Simple Workflow Service.’ It basically starts, runs, and retains workflow executions, as well as schedules tasks, adds markers, receives signals, and starts timers for those workflow executions. According to the information listed, with the free usage tier, “1,000 Amazon SWF executions can be initiated for free. A total of 10,000 activity tasks, signals, timers and markers and 30,000 workflow-days can also be used for free.”

    Amazon’s free usage tier allows users to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, and use Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer for free as well. AWS’s free usage tier can be used to run an application in the cloud, including launching new applications, testing existing applications in the cloud, or more. SWF would be included for free in this package.

    Obviously, with so little information, it’s hard to determine the exact details of what SWF does or who it will compete with at this point, but it appears to be new. We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment and will update when we hear back.

    Update: Amazon has taken all mentions of SWF off of the AWS Free Usage Tier Site; and has yet to comment.

    We’ve embedded screenshots below:


    Crunchbase

    Company: Amazon Web Services
    Website: aws.amazon.com
    Launch Date: 2006

    Amazon Web Services, LLC offers Web services that allow users to build businesses. Its Web services are self-contained functions that can be published and invoked across the Web using XML-based protocols. It offers functions for directly accessing Amazon’s technology platform and product data ranging from retrieving information on set of products to adding an item to a shopping cart. It offers Amazon Associates Web Service that exposes Amazon’s product data and e-commerce functionality; Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, a Web...

    → Learn more
    Tags: