CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-swf
Kiran Singnet
Kiran Singnet

Reputation: 21

AWS SWF vs Flow Framework

I am familiar with the Concept of amazon SWF . I can see many SDK in different languages to use SWF services. Also, amazon Flow Framework is a set of library to implement distributed applications . Currently this Flow Framework is available in Java and Ruby . Then how can we write distributed applications using SWF in other languages like python , php etc. Does this mean amazon provides the framework in Java and Ruby only , rest of the languages have other vendor's libraries ? Please explain .

Upvotes: 0

Views: 678

Answers (1)

jbbarth
jbbarth

Reputation: 712

You are right that AWS currently only provides high-level frameworks for Ruby and Java ("Flow" frameworks). Low-level access to SWF is available in most (all?) official SDKs though: boto2/3 for Python, go-sdk, etc.

When using SWF, you'll find yourself implementing mainly two types of programs: "activity workers" and "deciders" (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonswf/latest/developerguide/swf-dev-actors.html).

Using the Flow framework is not mandatory, but it helps implementing deciders by providing high-level abstractions for describing synchronisation points, defining which tasks can be run in parallel, retries, etc. There are also non-official libraries (I'm personally maintaining one for my company, "simpleflow").

If you want to use other languages for deciders, I recommend you try to use an existing framework first, then see if you want to implement this yourself (it's not trivial from my experience).

If you want to implement activities in other languages, I recommend you start using the Flow framework end-to-end, and then you can either 1/ fork and use your favorite language as a subprocess of Ruby/Java Flow workers, or 2/ mimic the serialisation logic of the Flow framework and implement workers directly yourself with low-level APIs (which is simple: poll for an activity, do work, then respond to SWF with the result).

Upvotes: 1

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