AWS previews AWS Application Composer for serverless

AWS CTO Werner Vogels always delivers a fairly hard core developer-centric keynote with plenty of gusto, often wearing a punk rock era T-shirt.

This year’s AWS re:Invent 202 saw him announce the preview of a new low-code tool: AWS Application Composer

The technology is intended to be used for visually designing and building serverless applications with a drag-and-drop interface (we said low-code not no-code, because is this granular level technology) to create the application architectures.

AWS Application Composer helps developers simplify and accelerate architecting, configuring and building serverless applications. Programmers and cloud engineers can drag, drop and connect AWS services into an application architecture by using AWS Application Composer’s browser-based visual canvas.

In distributed systems, the company suggests that empowering teams is a cultural shift needed for enabling developers to help translate business capabilities into code.

“This doesn’t mean every team works in isolation. Different teams or even new-joiners must understand what they are building to contribute to a project. The best way to understand architecture quickly is by using diagrams. Unfortunately, architectural diagrams are often outdated. Often, when releasing a workload in production, there are already discrepancies from the initial design and infrastructure. Developers new to building serverless applications can face a learning curve when composing applications from multiple AWS services. They must understand how to configure each service, and then learn and write infrastructure as code (IaC) to deploy their application,” notes AWS, in a launch blog.

Deployment-ready IaC

AWS Application Composer is hoped to help developers focus on building by maintaining deployment-ready Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) definitions.

But, crucially, these will be IaC definitions complete with integration configuration for each service.

“Developers new to building serverless applications can face a steep learning curve when composing applications from multiple AWS services. They need to understand how to configure each service and then learn and write IaC to deploy their application. When making changes to an existing application, developers can find it difficult to communicate architectural changes with their teams by reading updates to large IaC definition files,” says AWS.

With AWS Application Composer, users can start a new architecture from scratch, or can import an existing AWS CloudFormation or AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) template.

Further here, developers can add and connect AWS services and AWS Application Composer helps generate deployment-ready projects, such as IaC definitions and AWS Lambda function code scaffolding.

AWS Application Composer then maintains the visual representation of your application architecture in sync with your IaC, in real time.

AWS Application Composer is available at no additional charge in some initial AWS Regions with global rollout anticipated later.