What is AWS B2B Data Interchange (B2Bi)?

AWS B2B Data Interchange automates the transformation of Electronic Interchange Data (EDI) documents into JSON and XML formats to simplify your downstream data integrations. Businesses use EDI documents to exchange transactional data with trading partners, such as suppliers and end customers, using standardized formats such as X12, EDIFACT, or HL7v2. Currently, AWS B2B Data Interchange only supports X12 to JSON or XML conversions.

Currently, customers use commercial solutions hosted on-premises that require manual onboarding of trading partners, resulting in larger time to onboard, a high number of transaction errors, and missed SLAs. These problems result in negative impact to their business relationships with their trading partners. With B2Bi, customers can easily onboard and manage their trading partners and automate the transformation of EDI documents into common data representations such as JSON and XML using a low-code interface. This reduces the time, complexity, and cost associated with preparing and integrating EDI data into their business applications and purpose-built data lakes. As a result, customers can now focus on using their transactional data to drive business insights using the AWS suite of analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning services

How to get started with B2Bi

If you are a first-time user of B2Bi, we recommend that you begin by reading Getting started with AWS B2B Data Interchange (B2Bi).

For a self-paced learning experience, go through the EDI document exchange with AWS B2B Data Interchange Workshop, created by the B2Bi team. In this workshop, you learn how to receive and transform EDI documents from your business partners using AWS B2B Data Interchange and AWS Transfer Family.

Accessing B2Bi

You can work with AWS B2B Data Interchange in any of the following ways.

AWS Management Console

The console is a web-based user interface for managing B2Bi and AWS resources. If you've signed up for an AWS account, you can access the B2Bi console by signing into the AWS Management Console and choosing B2Bi from the AWS Management Console home page.

AWS Command Line Interface

You can use the AWS command line tools to issue commands or build scripts at your system's command line to perform AWS (including B2Bi) tasks.

The AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) provides commands for a broad set of AWS services. The AWS CLI is supported on Windows, macOS, and Linux. To get started, see the AWS Command Line Interface User Guide.

AWS SDKs

The architecture of B2Bi is designed to be programming language-neutral, using AWS supported interfaces to store and retrieve objects. You can access B2Bi and AWS programmatically by using the AWS B2B Data Interchange REST API. The REST API is an HTTP interface to B2Bi.

To use the REST API, you can use any toolkit that supports HTTP. You can even use a browser to fetch objects, as long as they are anonymously readable. The REST API uses standard HTTP headers and status codes, so that standard browsers and toolkits work as expected. In some areas, we have added functionality to HTTP (for example, we added headers to support access control). In these cases, we have done our best to add the new functionality in a way that matches the style of standard HTTP usage.

AWS provides software development kits (SDKs) that consist of libraries and sample code for various programming languages and platforms (Java, Python, Ruby, .NET, iOS, Android, and so on). The AWS SDKs provide a convenient way to create programmatic access to AWS B2B Data Interchange and AWS. B2Bi is a REST service. You can send requests to B2Bi using the AWS SDK libraries, which wrap the underlying AWS B2B Data Interchange REST API and simplify your programming tasks. For example, the SDKs take care of tasks such as calculating signatures, cryptographically signing requests, managing errors, and retrying requests automatically. For information about the AWS SDKs, including how to download and install them, see Tools for AWS.