8 AWS Application Integration Services: A Quick Overview

AWS Step Functions

Let’s start with the AWS Step Functions Application Integration service.

The Step Functions service makes it easy to visually set up and execute, and coordinate the components of distributed applications as a series of steps. As a result, you can easily build and state machines to execute the steps of your application in a reliable and scalable fashion.

For example, if you have worked on Apache AirFlow, functionally, it is similar to AirFlow.  There are some noticeable differences, though.

So, if your use case has series of functions, and you need to connect them to build a state machine, this is your service.

Amazon AppFlow

The next service in the Application Integration service category is Amazon AppFlow.

This is a fully managed integration service. And, it lets you securely transfer data between a SaaS application and AWS services. Additionally, you can enrich data through filters and validations.

For example, say you have sales lead records on S3. And you would like to insert these records into the SalesForce application and automate it. AppFlow can be used to automate your data transfer in just a few minutes. Without any coding. What it means, Amazon AppFlow is an excellent solution choice for this type of use case.

Amazon EventBridge

Another one is Amazon EventBridge. Amazon EventBridge is a serverless service. Serverless means you don’t need to set up or manage any infrastructure to use the service.

The EventBridge is an event bus service. The service connects applications' data from your apps, SaaS applications, and AWS Services.

By creating rules, you can have AWS services act automatically when changes occur in other AWS services, SaaS applications, or your own custom applications.

For example, if a file is uploaded on S3,  you can trigger an AWS Lambda function.  Or, if you would like to store event logs in the CloudWatch log group when a file is uploaded on S3, you can use Amazon EventBridge.

AmazonMQ

The next one is the AmazonMQ Application Integration service. It is a fully managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ.

The Amazon MQ service makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud. So, you can use AmazonMQ if you require migrating existing MQ-based applications.

Also, you can use AmazonMQ if you would like to build MQ based application on AWS.

Amazon Simple Notification Service

The next service in the list of Application Integration services is Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).

Amazon SNS is a managed messaging service — pub-sub service.  It lets you decouple publishers and subscribers. The SNS-based decoupling design is beneficial for application-to-application messaging for microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.

For example, using SNS topics, published events can be subscribed by AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, and other HTTP(S) endpoints.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)

The next one is Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). This is an AWS message queuing service that provides high throughput, system-to-system messaging.

This means you can use queues to decouple heavyweight processes. Or, you can use it as a buffer to batch the word loads. Amazon SQS stores messages until applications process them.

Amazon SWF

The other one is Amazon SWF. Amazon Simple Workflow Service is a workflow service for building scalable, resilient applications as workflows.

It seems like it is similar to AWS Step functions, and it is to some extent.  But, there are some differences. The main thematic difference is AWS Step functions are based on the idea of small fine-grained microservices. On the other hand, AWS SWF is based on the notion of “tasks.”

Managed Apache Airflow

The last Application Integration service on the list is Managed Apache Airflow. This is a managed service for Apache Airflow. What it means you can run Apache Airflow without provisioning and managing servers.