There are times in the technology world when a seemingly small, niche product will lead to bigger things. AppFlow, introduced last month by Amazon Web Services Inc., is one such example.

In 2015, AWS launched a service called VPC Endpoint for S3 that helped customers on private clouds tap into database services without going through the public-facing internet. This evolved two years later into PrivateLink, introduced as a way to make APIs available to customers within their own virtual private clouds. AWS services could now be accessed via private IP addresses.

Over nearly three years following the introduction of PrivateLink, data has become critical to enterprise operations. This prompted AWS to roll out AppFlow as a way to meet customer need.

“Enterprises just had this data all over the place, and they wanted to do something useful with it,” said Dave Brown (pictured), vice president of Elastic Compute Cloud at Amazon. “If that data is sitting in an application either on-premises or elsewhere in AWS, it’s very difficult to get it out of that application and into S3 or RedShift or one of those services where it can be manipulated. We’re trying to make it easy for organizations and enterprises to control the flow of their data between applications they use on-premises and on AWS.”

Brown spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Summit Online event. They discussed the secure, no-code features of AppFlow and how AWS facilitates running Windows workloads in the cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Avoiding internet transfers

AppFlow automates the transfer of data between AWS services and software-as-a-service applications, such as those provided by Salesforce Inc. or ServiceNow Inc. By integrating with PrivateLink, the information stays on the AWS network while avoiding exposure on the internet, capitalizing on a feature that customers appreciate, according to Brown.

“I’d rather be in a world where my data never traverses the internet,” he said.

The introduction of AppFlow also includes a way for users to take advantage of the service without requiring that customers create custom code. The goal was to eliminate the need for highly skilled developers to write time-consuming programs that would facilitate data transfer between AWS and on-premises networks or SaaS providers.

“It’s no-code for almost all use cases,” Brown said. “For a lot of customers that we spoke to, that was a bottleneck and they didn’t have a developer to help them. The important thing to think about with design is to see how much of the ecosystem you can leverage.”

Support for Windows

In addition to making it easier for customers to access application data from major SaaS providers, AWS has also extended a helping hand when it comes to supporting cross-platform workloads in a multicloud world. Microsoft Corp. is a case in point.

AWS makes it clear that customers have been running Microsoft Windows workloads on AWS for more than 10 years, and it runs 2x more Windows Server instances than the next largest cloud provider, which happens to be Microsoft.

“We still believe that AWS is the best place to run a Windows workload,” Brown said. “If you think about all the services and features, the breadth and extensiveness of AWS, that’s critically important for all of our Windows customers as well. It’s a very large part of our business today.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit Online event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Summit Online event. Neither Amazon Web Services, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE