Amazon AppFlow FAQs

Amazon AppFlow is a fully managed integration service that enables you to 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, in just a few clicks. With AppFlow, you can run data flows at nearly any scale at the frequency you choose - on a schedule, in response to a business event, or on demand. You can configure powerful data transformation capabilities like filtering and validation to generate rich, ready-to-use data as part of the flow itself, without additional steps. AppFlow automatically encrypts data in motion, and allows users to restrict data from flowing over the public Internet for SaaS applications that are integrated with AWS PrivateLink, reducing exposure to security threats.

AppFlow relieves you from investing significant time and highly-skilled developer staff to build and maintain 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 waiting months for IT to finish integration projects. Specifically, the benefits include:

Speed and agility: Amazon AppFlow enables you to integrate applications in a few minutes – no more waiting days or weeks to code custom connectors. Features like data pagination, error logging, and network connection retries are included by default so there’s no coding or management. With Amazon Appflow, data flow quality is built in, and you can enrich the flow of data through masking, mapping, merging, filtering, and validation as part of the flow itself.

Privacy and security: AppFlow encrypts data at rest and in motion. You can encrypt data with AWS managed keys or bring your own custom keys. It also allows users to restrict data from flowing over the public Internet using Amazon VPC endpoints enabled by AWS PrivateLink. This minimizes the threat from Internet based attacks and the risk of sensitive data leakage.

Scalability: AppFlow easily scales up without the need to plan or provision resources, so you can move large volumes of data without breaking it down into multiple batches. Using Amazon AppFlow, you can easily 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 points of failure while running within the resilient AWS infrastructure.

Go to the AWS Management Console and select AppFlow from the Services menu. This will launch the AppFlow home page. An authorized IAM user can create and configure a Flow using the following steps:

Connect your data source and destination - Name your flow and choose from the list of integrated application sources and destinations to get started.

Choose your data flow trigger - On demand flows run once immediately, scheduled flows run at a specified interval, and event-based flows run in response to business events like the creation of a sales opportunity or a status change in a support ticket.

Map source fields to destination - Configure field mapping within AppFlow, or for data sets with a large number of fields, upload a csv file with bulk field mappings. Optionally, add data field transformations, like masking sensitive financial information or combining first and last names.

Add data filters and validations - Add optional data filters like only including new or selected data fields in your flow, and validations, like ensuring numerical fields contain numbers.

Finish - Click Create Flow and your data will begin to flow based on the triggers you set. You can review and troubleshoot data flows any time by looking back at your dashboard.

AppFlow transfers data between the data source and the data target, runs the selected transformations, and monitors the processing. AppFlow integrates with underlying AWS services for automation, security, and monitoring, including AWS PrivateLink, AWS KMS, and Amazon CloudTrail.

Supported AWS services include Amazon S3, Amazon RedShift, Amazon Connector Customer Profiles, Amazon Lookout for Metrics, and Amazon Honeycode, and we’re continuing to add more all the time.

AppFlow gives you the flexibility to configure their own Flows. Some examples of flows include:

Create a copy of a Salesforce object (i.e. opportunity, case, campaign) in Amazon S3.

Send case tickets from Zendesk into an Amazon Redshift table.

Hydrate an Amazon S3 data lake with transactional data from SAP S/4HANA ERP.

Push records from a CSV file in Amazon S3 into a Salesforce account, contact, or lead object.

Transfer results such as lead scores and account churn risk scores from Amazon S3 to Salesforce.

You can run flows on demand, based on business events, or on a schedule:

On Demand: Run data flows on demand, as soon as you click “Run Flow” to do bulk transfers or tests,

Event-based: Run data flows in response to business events like the creation of a sales opportunity, the status change of a support ticket, or the completion of a registration form.

Scheduled: Run data flows at a routine schedule at the time interval you choose to keep data in sync, or run flows routinely.

A: Yes. AWS will use commercially reasonable efforts to make AppFlow available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage for each AWS region, during any monthly billing cycle, of at least 99.9%. For details, please review the AppFlow Service Level Agreement .