Business Rules Engine AWS: Nected’s Latest Guide

A Business Rules Engine (BRE) is a software application that oversees decision processes using pre-framed logic to determine results. Business Rules Engine AWS is a powerful service to automate decision-making processes in applications by facilitating the creation, management, and execution of business rules. 

They make accurate decisions and are very useful for complex technological dependencies, where regulatory or company rules change often and always require logical changes. Automation in the Business Rules Engine can help the company handle rule changes very easily. They also help companies to avoid penalties for any compliance failures.

Business Rules in Engine in AWS have strong core functionalities and a simple architecture to design and implement rules. In this blog, let us see a comprehensive overview of business rules engine AWS, architecture, UI, and design.

What is Business Rules Engine AWS? 

The AWS Business Rules Engine (BRE) is a useful service that provides you with an interface to create, execute and manage business rules for your application without writing code or only involving low code.

Here are the top reasons that AWS Business Rules Engine and Nected are preferred by companies and developers: 

• Flexibility.
• Scalability.
• Elasticity.
• Integrative Mechanism.

Key Points on Business Rules Engine in AWS

In this section, let us know about the useful features of the Business Rules engine AWS: 

• No-code policy & Approach: This feature even allows non-developers to define business rules through a GUI-based platform to reduce the need for complex coding processes. Business Rules engine AWS and Nected are similar in this parameter, to promote simplicity and reduction for extensive programming. ‍
• Scalability: Your rules can be extremely scalable with the AWS infrastructure which assures flexibility, elasticity and performance as your business transforms in each stage. ‍
• Integration: You can integrate it with other potential AWS services, which will help you build a cohesive ecosystem to execute rules in your applications. ‍
• Real-time Evaluation: It also supports a contemporary evaluation of rules to provide immediate responsiveness to dynamic conditions in a business. ‍
• Customizable Actions: The Business Rules Engine AWS and Nected platform are similar in this case as we note that both of them have a feature that will allow you to define customized actions when a rule is triggered. 
• ‍Monitoring and Logging: It offers tools for monitoring the execution of rules, and logging, and helps in troubleshooting.

Business Rules Engine AWS Example Scenarios

Nowadays, millions of decisions are being made in organizations. We don’t always realize that rules govern the decision’s time and area. Till now, many businesses have faced failures in applying proper decision logic to each task and reaching the desired outcomes. As a developer, you must know the proper time and area to apply the rule logic. 

Some examples where Business Rules Engine AWS will help include:

Fraud Detection in Financial Transactions

• The problem scenario is the detection of unusual patterns in expenditure. 
• Here, the AWS Business Rules Engine immediately triggers fraud alerts or enables transaction blocking. 
• To do the transactional blocking more efficiently, you can also use Nected. This platform prevents potential fraud by applying custom rules that may be based on transaction behavior.

Inventory Management in E-commerce

• The problem scenario is low stock levels for a popular product. 
• Here AWS Business Rules Engine adjusts pricing, initiates restocking orders, and updates marketing promotions. 

Content Moderation in User-Generated Platforms

• The problem scenario is a notification of inappropriate content reports. 
• Here, Business Rules Engine AWS and Nected both platforms have the potential to dynamically update content moderation rules to identify and take action against inappropriate content to maintain a safe and compliant user environment.

Rule Definition and Authoring With Business Rules Engine AWS

Business rules in AWS Business Rules Engine are defined using a syntax that comprises conditions and actions. Understanding the syntax is important for creating effective rules. There are three main important parameters in rule definition as listed below: 

• Conditions: These are logical statements that evaluate incoming data. Conditions use operators (such as equal to, greater than, or contains) to compare data values. For example, a condition could be if (temperature > 30).‍
• Actions: Actions are a definition of a sequence of tasks that will be executed when a rule's conditions are met. These can range from invoking AWS Lambda functions to triggering events. For instance, an action could invoke the Lambda function "ProcessHighTemperature".‍
• Logical Operators: Connect conditions within a rule using logical operators like AND, OR, and NOT to create complex decision logic.

Using the Visual Editor for Rule Creation:

The Business Rules Engine AWS provides a visual editor for easily creating and managing the rule creation, editing and maintenance. Here is a small guide on how to use the features of the AWS Business Rules Engine: 

• Access the Visual Editor: Log in to the AWS Management Console, navigate to the Business Rules service, and access the Visual Editor.‍
• Create a Rule Project: Organize rules by creating a rule project. This step ensures proper categorization and management.‍
• Add Rules: Within a project, use the visual editor to add rules. Drag and drop conditions and actions, connecting them logically.‍
• Define Conditions: Specify operators, references and rule policies for support using the self-explanatory GUI.
• ‍Configure Actions: Next, define actions that are associated with a particular rule. You can specify AWS Lambda functions to execute or events to trigger.‍
• Test Rules: Use testing features in the visual editor to verify rule behavior with sample data.

Advanced Authoring Options for Experienced Users:

Advanced users require more functionality and features. For this AWS Business Rules Engine offers advanced authoring options. These may include:

• Rule JSON: Rules can be expressed in JSON format, allowing users to write and edit rules directly in this structured format. 
• ‍Custom Expressions: Experienced users can make use of the custom expressions and functions to create complex conditions, offering a higher degree of flexibility in rule authoring. Business Rules Engine AWS and Nected make it easy for developers by providing rulesets, rule chains, decision tables and many GUI interfaces involving low-code or no code.

‍

• Integration with Code Repositories: Rules can be stored in version-controlled repositories, facilitating collaboration and code management practices.

AWS Business Rules Engine Architecture

AWS Business Rules Engine serves as an orchestrator to evaluate the rules in response to events and interact with other AWS services, and external components to implement dynamic business logic. This architecture also provides a way to integrate Agile Mechanisms within the rules engine. In this section, let us see the architecture of the Business Rules Engine AWS. 

The components in the high-level architecture of AWS Business Rules Engine include: 

• Rules Repository - It is responsible for storing the business rules.
• Data Store - It hosts the customer records or serves as the customer master.
• A Processing Engine - It is a central engine, where business rules are defined and configured. Data Store to capture the results - To capture the results and manage a member register. 
• End-to-End Workflow - It orchestrates the entire mechanism. 

The image shown below depicts the architecture of the AWS Business Rules Engine.

A Detailed View of All the Components in the Architecture: 

In the high-level architecture above, there were five important components in the context. Now, let us see how each works and what other supporting components it has. 

• Event Sources:  Event sources are some changes in database records, incoming messages from a queue, or any other event-driven mechanism. ‍
• AWS Business Rules Engine: It is a processing engine where business rules are created, processed, configured and managed through a GUI. The engine handles rule evaluation based on incoming events and triggers. ‍
• Conditions and Actions: The conditions define the criteria for triggering a rule. Actions are the tasks to perform when a rule is set. These both are configured within the Business Rules engine AWS. ‍
• Integration with AWS Services: The AWS Business Rules Engine integrates with other AWS services such as Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, or Step functions. This also allows for executing customized actions. These processes involve invoking serverless functions, updating databases, or triggering workflows. 
• ‍Monitoring and Logging: AWS CloudWatch and other monitoring tools capture logs and metrics that are related to rule evaluations. This provides insights into system behavior and helps with troubleshooting and optimization.

AWS Business Rules Engine - Solution Implementation 

This section emphasizes a solution architecture that involves cleaning and deduplicating customer data and creating master data where a company has many sources for customer data.

The above diagram depicts how such an architecture can be analyzed using AWS Native services that reduce spending on operational maintenance tasks, such as patching and capacity management thereby ensuring access to the service feature. This architecture can also be improved via automation. 

Solution Overview

The solution uses an Agile Business Rules Engine approach. In this section, we will implement it using Business Rules Engine AWS. 

Firstly, get all of the customer-related data required to run the business rules into your organization’s data lake. The data lake acts as a central location for all data sources running on the rules engine. 

Here are some important points to consider to implementing the data lake:

• Identify the most important data elements or sources that would be essential to running your business rules.
• Identify the source systems that have the data elements.
• You can use a Master Data Management (MDM) tool or third-party tools to combine customer information if you have more than one customer data source. 
• Identification of memberships can be done by identifying the golden source of customer data. 
• Note whether the customer information can be merged with other data tables like service, products, delivery and roles.

The above picture depicts the Agile AWS Business Rules Engine design for integrating a customized solution with Data Lake.

Working Mechanism: 

• Firstly, it creates data frames of the customer data from the data lake and rules repository.
• As the next step, it reads the critical data tables from the data lake and rules data in the Aurora database.
• Next, it distributes and runs the inclusion or exclusion SQL rules in parallel. It is done against all of the customers to make sure that every customer is evaluated with a specific rule. 
• Finally, it writes the results from the SQL to the ephemeral storage or S3 bucket. This is done to make the data able to run evaluations based on the results of inclusions and exclusions. 
• This step can be executed in any memory.  It may depend on your data volume and performance standards.

Rules Engine & Nected

Coding-based architectures and rules engines other than Business Rules Engine AWS and Nected are only suitable for developers with high programming skills. However, Nected has a hybrid business rule management feature to combine the benefits of both declarative and script-based mechanisms. It has a well-designed drag-and-drop interface to make it accessible and simple for minimal technical expertise. 

Nected Rules Engine vs AWS Business Rules Engine

The below tabular column specifies some potential differences between the AWS Business Rules Engine and the Nected Business Rules Engine.

Conclusion

In summary, AWS Business Rules Engine combines many features that encourage developers to create rules engines interactively. This blog has covered the Business Rules Engine AWS examples, a tutorial on creating rules and definitions, architecture, a sample implementation, considerations and working mechanisms. You will be now able to develop applications with an AWS Business Rules Engine to minimize risks in real-time applications and maintain a scalable infrastructure. 

FAQs

Q1.What is a Business Rule Engine on AWS?

A Business Rule Engine on AWS is a service that allows users to define, manage, and automate business rules in the cloud environment. It helps streamline decision-making processes and enhance flexibility in applications.

Q2.How can I implement a Business Rule Engine on AWS?

You can implement a Business Rule Engine on AWS using services like Amazon EventBridge, AWS Step Functions, or custom Lambda functions. These services enable you to define and execute business rules efficiently within your AWS infrastructure.