Amazon launches AWS AppFlow, a new service for managing SaaS data flows

Amazon Web Services on Wednesday announced the launch of AppFlow, a fully managed service that lets customers manage the flow of data between AWS and third party SaaS applications. With AppFlow, Amazon said customers can create and automate bidirectional data flows without writing custom integration code. AppFlow also works with PrivateLink to route data flows through the Amazon's network instead of over the public Internet.

"Amazon AppFlow provides an intuitive and easy way for customers to combine data from AWS and SaaS applications without moving it across the public Internet," said AWS VP Kurt Kufeld.  "With Amazon AppFlow, our customers bring together and manage petabytes, even exabytes, of data spread across all of their applications – all without having to develop custom connectors or manage underlying API and network connectivity."

Also: Top cloud providers in 2020: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, hybrid, SaaS players

Separately, AWS announced that EC2 Inf1 instances are now available to run on SageMaker, its fully-managed machine learning service. First announced at re:Invent 2019, Inf1 are machine learning inference instances powered by Inferentia, the company's high-performance machine learning inference chip.

The Inf1 instances are meant to provide lower latency, 3X higher throughput and up to 40 percent lower cost per inference compared to competing chips.

With SageMaker running on Inf1 instances, Amazon said developers now have an additional choice of EC2 instance types, ranging from small CPU instances to multi-GPU instances. This allows them to choose the right cost/performance ratio for their prediction infrastructure, the company said.