Announcing Amazon CodeCatalyst (preview), a Unified Software Development Service

Today, we announced the preview release of Amazon CodeCatalyst. A unified software development and delivery service, Amazon CodeCatalyst enables software development teams to quickly and easily plan, develop, collaborate on, build, and deliver applications on AWS, reducing friction throughout the development lifecycle. In my time as a developer the biggest excitement—besides shipping software to users—was the start of a new project, or being invited to join a project. Both came with the anticipation of building something cool, cutting new code—seeing an idea come to life. However, starting out was sometimes a slow process. My team or I would need to update our local development environments—or entirely new machines—with tools, libraries, and programming frameworks. We had to create source code repositories…

Announcing Additional Data Connectors for Amazon AppFlow

Gathering insights from data is a more effective process if that data isn’t fragmented across multiple systems and data stores, whether on premises or in the cloud. Amazon AppFlow provides bidirectional data integration between on-premises systems and applications, SaaS applications, and AWS services. It helps customers break down data silos using a low- or no-code, cost-effective solution that’s easy to reconfigure in minutes as business needs change. Today, we’re pleased to announce the addition of 22 new data connectors for Amazon AppFlow, including: Marketing connectors (e.g., Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Instagram Ads, LinkedIn Ads). Connectors for customer service and engagement (e.g., MailChimp, Sendgrid, Zendesk Sell or Chat, and more). Business operations (Stripe, QuickBooks Online, and GitHub). In total, Amazon AppFlow…

Classifying and Extracting Mortgage Loan Data with Amazon Textract

Mortgage loan applications, at least in the United States, comprise around 500 or more pages of diverse documents. In order for applications to be reviewed, all these documents need to be classified, and the data on each form extracted. This isn’t as easy as it might sound! Besides different data structures in each document, the same data element may have different names on different documents—for example, SSN, or Social Security Number, or Tax ID. These three all refer to the same data. Today, a new Analyze Lending API, for analyzing and classifying the documents contained in mortgage loan application packages, and extracting the data they contain, is available for Amazon Textract. The new API was created in response to requests…

Automated in-AWS Failback for AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

I first covered AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS) in a 2021 blog post. In that post, I described how DRS “enables customers to use AWS as an elastic recovery site for their on-premises applications without needing to invest in on-premises DR infrastructure that lies idle until needed. Once enabled, DRS maintains a constant replication posture for your operating systems, applications, and databases.” I’m happy to announce that, today, DRS now also supports in-AWS failback, adding to the existing support for non-disruptive recovery drills and on-premises failback included in the original release. I also wrote in my earlier post that drills are an important part of disaster recovery since, if you don’t test, you simply won’t know for sure that your…