Amazon Appflow and it’s Benefits
This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon.
Introduction
The cloud environment is constantly evolving, with AWS and Salesforce leading the way in innovation. It was just last year at Dreamforce that Salesforce and AWS announced a strong global partnership in the cloud market. At that time, they shared new innovative solutions, including the integration of Amazon Connect as part of Salesforce Cloud Voice, which opened up a whole new opportunity for organizations to provide superior customer service. At AllCloud, our leading AWS and Salesforce experts have been working on synergies between AWS and Salesforce to solve customers’ business challenges for years.
And now Amazon recently released AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that allows you to securely exchange data between Software as a Service (Salesforce) and AWS. This new solution allows users an easy and cost-effective way to transfer data. It’s an excellent tool for Salesforce users who want to jump into AWS and see immediate benefits.
What is Amazon AppFlow?
Announced in April, Amazon AppFlow is a fully managed integration service that lets you securely transfer data between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications like Salesforce, Marketo, Slack, and ServiceNow and AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon. Redshift is just a few clicks away.
With AppFlow, you can run data flows at almost any scale and frequency you choose—scheduled, in response to a business event, or on demand. You can configure data transformation functions such as filtering and validation to generate rich, ready-to-use data as part of the flow itself, with no additional steps. AppFlow automatically encrypts data in motion. It allows users to restrict the flow of data over the public Internet for SaaS applications that are integrated with AWS PrivateLink, reducing exposure to security threats.
Amazon AppFlow allows you to do the following:
- Get started fast — Create a data flow to transfer data between source and destination in minutes without writing any code.
- Connect your data – Aggregate data from multiple sources to train your analytics tools more efficiently and save money.
- Track your data — With Amazon AppFlow’s flow management tools, you can track what data has moved where and when.
- Keep your data safe – security is a top priority. We encrypt your data at rest and during transmission.
- Transfer data privately – Amazon AppFlow integrates with AWS PrivateLink to provide private data transfer over the AWS infrastructure instead of public data transfer over the Internet.
What are the benefits of AppFlow?
AppFlow frees you from investing significant time and highly skilled developers in creating and maintaining custom API connectors for AWS services to exchange data with SaaS applications. SaaS application administrators and business analysts can quickly implement most of the integrations they need without IT having to wait months for integration projects to be completed. Specifically, the benefits include:
- Speed and agility: Amazon AppFlow lets you integrate apps in minutes—no more days or weeks waiting to code custom connectors. Features like data paging, error logging, and network retries are included by default, so there’s no coding or administration involved. With Amazon AppFlow, the quality of the data flow is integrated, and you can enrich the data flow with masking, mapping, merging, filtering, and validation as part of the flow itself.
- Security and Privacy: You can encrypt data using AWS-managed keys or bring your keys. It also allows users to throttle the flow of data over the public Internet using Amazon VPC endpoints enabled by AWS PrivateLink. This minimizes the threat of internet attacks and the risk of leaking sensitive data.
- Scalability: AppFlow scales easily without planning or provisioning, so you can move large volumes of data without breaking it into multiple batches. With Amazon AppFlow, you can quickly transfer millions of Salesforce records or Zendesk tickets—all while running a single flow.
- Reliability: AppFlow uses a highly available architecture with redundant, isolated resources to prevent any single failure while running within AWS’ resilient infrastructure.
Unique Pricing Structure
The pricing model makes AppFlow even more attractive. Although there are many similar tools in the market, none of them can provide the cost value of AppFlow. There are no upfront fees to use AppFlow, and customers only pay for the number of flows they run and the amount of data processed. You pay for every successful stream. Initiating a flow is a call to the source application to transfer data to the destination. Flow runs to check for new data count towards your flow running costs, even if there is no new data on the source system to transfer.
Amazon AppFlow’s monthly processed data by volume is billed per GB and aggregates all flows that exist in an AWS account. Data processing refers to schema mapping, filtering, and field validation to name a few. With Amazon AppFlow, you are not responsible for AWS data transfer fees and only pay the data processing costs for the flows.
How does Amazon AppFlow affect salesforce users?
AppFlow enables third-party applications on AWS to update Salesforce and vice versa, leveraging Amazon AppFlow’s bidirectional capabilities and changing data capture capabilities. AppFlow allows you to easily create automated and rich data that spans multiple applications. AppFlow offers many additional features that the default Salesforce data loader cannot effectively provide. Salesforce users can instantly extract data object by object and store it in Amazon S3. This gives Salesforce users the ability to move data without quickly purchasing an expensive integration tool.
Conclusion
AppFlow lets you connect and map Salesforce objects and fields in minutes. This allows you to run and schedule through the AWS AppFlow UI without having to worry about additional licensing. For example, if you collect data about how your customers interact with apps and websites, and you need to transfer it to S3. This is something that Salesforce cannot do because a Salesforce database cannot directly connect to a database running SQL. AppFlow allows you to efficiently combine all these data points into an S3 environment. And if you’re already using S3 for your data lake, the benefits are even better.
- Amazon AppFlow is a fully managed integration service that lets you securely transfer data between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications like Salesforce, Marketo, Slack, and ServiceNow and AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon. Redshift is just a few clicks away.
- Amazon AppFlow’s monthly processed data by volume is billed per GB and aggregates all flows that exist in an AWS account. Data processing refers to schema mapping, filtering, and field validation to name a few.
- AppFlow frees you from investing significant time and highly skilled developers in creating and maintaining custom API connectors for AWS services to exchange data with SaaS applications.
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