At today’s re:Invent conference, AWS announced the launch of AWS Application Composer, a new low-code tool for visually designing and building serverless applications. The service provides developers with a visual canvas and a simple drag-and-drop interface to create the application architecture, connect their resources, and design their features.
Since AWS CTO Werner Vogels was not present during his keynote today, many developers want to get started building serverless applications, but the entry barrier is still too high for many. Partly that’s because you have to think differently about serverless applications, given that they are generally asynchronous systems (one of the main topics of Vobels’ keynote today). So the team set out to improve this with Application Composer.
“Sometimes developers opt for a synchronous system because it is convenient. They look so much simpler,” he said. “In a synchronous system you have all these components. In the event driven [architecture], how they work together can sometimes look a little scary. So we’ve been thinking about how to simplify this. For example, how do you make it easier for developers who have never used serverless before? How do you know where to start? What services do they need? How do they work together? We really wanted to make this easier.”
With Application Composer, developers can easily build functions to perform basic transformation tasks, for example, and then deploy them with just a few clicks.
There is an escape hatch so developers can then also take this code and keep working on it in their IDE of choice. But as Vogels pointed out, because this is a visual system, it’s also now much easier to share and collaborate on this code with colleagues.
