Amazon Web Services announces new managed service and partners

Cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made a trio of announcements at its AWS Summit in New York, including the introduction of a new managed service.

API Gateway

This is a new pay-as-you-go managed service that allows AWS customers to create, publish, maintain, monitor and secure Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can create an API that acts as a ‘front door’ for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from their back-end services, such as workloads running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), or code running on AWS Lambda.

Amazon API Gateway handles all of the tasks associated with accepting and processing billions of daily API calls, including traffic management, authorisation and access control. Amazon API Gateway has no minimum fees or startup costs – developers pay for the API calls they receive and the amount of data transferred out.

"With the proliferation of mobile devices and the rise in the Internet of Things (IoT), it is increasingly common for companies to make their back-end systems and data accessible to applications through APIs," said AWS in a statement.

"With Amazon API Gateway, customers have a pay-as-you-go service that takes care of all of that undifferentiated operational and security heavy lifting involved in creating and maintaining APIs. And to make it easy for developers to use these APIs in their applications, Amazon API Gateway can generate client SDKs for a number of platforms, including JavaScript, iOS, and Android."

AWS Device Farm

AWS Device Farm is a new service that helps mobile app developers test their apps on smartphones, tablets and other devices to improve the quality of their Android and Fire OS apps.

Developers can upload their apps and run tests simultaneously. As tests complete, developers receive reports that identify problems. Like API Gateway, there is no setup costs – developers pay as they go. 

"For mobile app developers, delivering high-quality apps across all of the different device and OS combinations is a major effort – it’s time consuming, complicated, and expensive. And, as new devices continue to enter the market, developers are looking for an easier way to build and test across them," said Marco Argenti, Vice President, AWS.

"AWS Device Farm gives developers a very simple and cost-effective way to test the real user experience of their apps across multiple device types at scale. And, when used along with other AWS Mobile Services like Amazon Cognito, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), developers have a full platform that makes it even easier to build, deploy, test, and iterate great mobile apps."

New partners

AWS has announced that Looker, Qlik, Sumo Logic and Works Applications are using AWS as the core infrastructure platform that powers their SaaS solutions. 

They join other ISVs such as Acquia, Emdeon, IMS Health, Informatica, Infor, MicroStrategy, Onshape, Pegasystems, Software AG, Splunk and TIBCO.

"The cloud has become the default platform for businesses of all sizes, and there has never been a better time for innovative software providers like Looker, Qlik, Sumo Logic, and Works Applications to bring their differentiated and innovative solutions to the global market," said Terry Wise, VP for the worldwide partner ecosystem at AWS.

Looker is a data analytics firm that works with the likes of Yahoo, Gilt, Warby Parker and Sony, Qlik is a visual analytics firm with cloud offerings Qlik Sense Cloud, Qlik Sense Charts, and Qlik DataMarket, while Sumo Logic is a data analytics service designed to help enterprise customers gain insights and full stack visibility into the growing pool of machine data within their IT environments. 

Finally, Works Applications is the largest enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider in Japan and holds nearly 35 per cent marketshare in that market, serving customers across all verticals, including healthcare, education, manufacturing, energy and transportation. 

Other announcements

AWS Service Catalog lets users browse listings of products that they have access to, locate the one that they want, and launch it on their own.

AWS CodeCommit is a managed revision control service that hosts Git repositories and works with existing Git-based tools. 

And finally AWS CodePipeline is a tool that helps to model and automate the software release process. The automation provided by CodePipeline is designed to make the release process more reliable and more efficient, says AWS.