Amazon Web Services Inc. added to its growing catalog of big data services today with the launch of a new managed offering that helps customers execute data processing workloads in the cloud.

The new service, called Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow, is meant to aid users of the open-source Apache Airflow tool that’s used to author, schedule and monitor data workflows.

Danilo Poccia, chief evangelist at AWA for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, said in a blog post that Apache Airflow is used to simplify data processing pipelines by decomposing them into a series of smaller tasks, then executing them as part of a workflow.

Data processing is a necessary evil these days for any company that uses analytics and machine learning tools to derive insights from the massive amounts of information stored in their computer systems.

But although Apache Airflow is a useful tool for doing this, using it presents some challenges of its own. “Manually installing, maintaining, and scaling Airflow, and at the same time handling security, authentication, and authorization for its users takes much of the time you’d rather use to focus on solving actual business problems,” Poccia said.

Amazon MWAA is a fully managed service that removes the burden of installing, maintaining and ensuring the security of Apache Airflow. With it, customers can use the same familiar platform to manage their data processing workloads, and benefit from improved scalability, availability and security, without needing to worry about the underlying infrastructure, Poccia said.

Amazon MWAA is being made generally available today in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt) and Europe (Stockholm) regions.

In other news today, AWS said it has built a new application programming interface for financial organizations and other that need to keep track of “events” such as bankruptcy, changes in executive leadership at companies, and merger and acquisition announcements.

The new API is called Amazon Comprehend Events, and it’s designed to scan text documents such as news reports and press releases in order to pick up and keep track of these events.

It’s based on the Amazon Comprehend natural language processing service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text documents. With Amazon Comprehend Events, financial services analysts can use the event data it pulls to populate knowledge graphs without needing to input anything themselves manually.

The service works by using Amazon Comprehend to tag financial events such as initial public offerings and acquisitions, and users can then feed this data into their own AI applications and graph visualization tools for analysis, Amazon said.

Image: Amazon