Businesses dream of accomplishing all of their tasks from a single application; however, for most businesses, this is not possible, so they turn to AWS application integration. For many organizations, the number of applications essential to daily business operations continues to increase.
Managing a growing number of mobile apps, web apps, cloud applications, and the associated resources and media can overwhelm even the most organized companies. In this context, application integration becomes one of the most valuable AWS services.
This post will explain application integration, why it is beneficial to businesses, and the different AWS services used for application integration.
What Is Application Integration?
Application integration takes separate apps, components, and systems and enables them to work together and share data, resources, and media. As a result, companies find that application integration simplifies the maintenance and management of applications critical to business operations.
With HiTech advancements like edge computing and other distributed systems generating massive amounts of data, application integration ensures all applications are kept up to date, redundancies are eliminated, and data is not duplicated. In addition, the right application integration infrastructure allows vital applications to communicate with one another and eliminate inefficiencies in business processes.
AWS services contain several application integration tools that enable decoupled components in distributed systems, serverless apps, and microservices to communicate with one another. However, before we explore the top tools offered by AWS, let’s highlight the business benefits of application integration.
The Benefits of Application Integration
We have briefly noted that application integration promotes efficiency and eliminates redundancies. Now let’s take a look at the top business benefits of AWS application integration, including:
- Agility
- Reduced operational responsibilities
- Component independence
- Powerful messaging services
Agility
DevOps requires and produces more agile workflows. Companies that use AWS application integration services can develop with greater agility. With application integration, you no longer have to write custom code to enable interoperability, reducing workload and increasing productivity. Application integration also significantly reduces the amount of code that needs to be repeated in functions and microservices. As a result, build more efficiently with AWS application integration.
Reduced Operational Responsibilities
Application integration shifts operational responsibilities from your company to AWS. Spend your valuable time focusing on innovation and developing new products, and leave the busy work to AWS. AWS application integration services include automatic scaling, which means your business no longer has to handle provisioning, patching, or managing server resources. Instead, use the time of your skilled IT team more efficiently to focus on high-level tasks.
Component Independence
Component independence protects the function of your applications should you experience a technical failure or a spike in resource demand. Application integration allows your business to decouple the components of your applications while retaining interoperability. If one component fails or sees a sudden spike in user demand, the rest of your components will not be affected. Apps with a more traditional architecture would experience widespread failure if one component failed. Use AWS application integration to scale components independently of one another.
Powerful Messaging Services
Timely communication is at the heart of successful application integration. AWS application integration services provide several powerful messaging tools. You don’t have to worry about messaging throughput levels with AWS services. AWS also uses a novel cross-availability zone message storage system to guarantee high levels of availability and operational durability. AWS application integration allows your business to message with confidence.
The Top AWS Application Integration Services
AWS is a very popular, robust platform used for a variety of development services. As a result, there are too many application integration services to list all of them here. However, we will cover the most powerful and popular services, including:
- Amazon SNS
- Amazon SQS
- Amazon SWF
- AWS Step Functions
Amazon SNS
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is used to create and integrate loosely coupled and distributed applications. Amazon SNS is a web service that simplifies managing and sending notifications from the cloud through instantaneous push-based delivery. SNS is used to support an impressive number of needs, from event notification and application monitoring to workflow system management and time-sensitive information updates.
Any application that generates or consumes notifications is supported by Amazon SNS. SNS uses a flexible message delivery system that is provided over multiple transport protocols. Amazon SNS is relatively inexpensive, there are no upfront costs to begin using this AWS service, and businesses can pay for the resources they use as they use them.
Amazon SQS
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) enables companies to send, store, and receive messages between software components. Simple Queue Service is a temporary repository for messages that have yet to be processed. This distributed queue system acts as a valuable buffer between the component that is creating and saving data and the component that receives the data for processing.
The decoupling of these interrelated components promotes application elasticity. Unlike Amazon Simple Notification Service, which is push-based, Simple Queue Service is pull-based. By utilizing SQS, application components can send and receive messages between themselves in massive quantities, which promotes high levels of app performance.
Amazon SWF
Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF) allows companies to coordinate work across distributed systems. SWF is primarily used to process background jobs with parallel or sequential steps. The best way to describe SWF is a fully managed task coordinator and state tracker. Amazon SWF is best suited for tasks that take over 500 milliseconds to complete, the state of processing needs to be accurately tracked, or task failures need to be recovered or retried.
SWF gives businesses the ability to build asynchronous, distributed systems as workflows. Amazon SWF is best suited for human-enabled workflows such as procedural requests or order fulfillment.
AWS Step Functions
AWS Step Functions is used to coordinate and organize the components of a distributed system as a series of steps. It is a serverless way for businesses to sequence multiple AWS services in business-critical applications. To simplify the complexities of sequencing, AWS Step Functions uses a visual editor that gives users the ability to build and run service sequences. Build reliable, scalable service sequences quickly using Amazon Step Functions.
Final Thoughts
AWS application integration helps businesses achieve more with their IT resources. If you want to learn more about AWS and its capabilities, reach out to an AWS partner. An AWS partner will not only be able to help you learn about AWS, but they will also be able to help you integrate AWS into your IT infrastructure in a manner that is aligned with your Quality Assurance standards. Discover all the benefits of AWS application integration by speaking with an AWS partner.
