My team launched a thing today, and while there are so many features I can talk about (and many more to come), it’s a visual builder after all, so let me visually demonstrate what AWS Application Composer does:

In a nutshell, you can drag and drop serverless resources such as Lambda functions, API Gateway APIs, EventBridge rules, etc. onto a canvas, connect them to each other to add permissions, and out comes CloudFormation YAML with best practices baked in!

Oh yeah, and we're using the File System Access API to save all of this to your local disk, so you can quickly push to git and deploy what you've built using the AWS SAM CLI 🤯

So why does this matter, especially in the serverless ecosystem? Because while there are numerous solutions for diagramming architectures, you then still have to learn how to provision those resources and get all of the permissions right for them to actually work. Before today, that usually meant learning to code that architecture in some sort of proprietary framework.

How visual building delivers the promise of serverless

The promise of serverless was initially this: focus on your business logic, and let the cloud provider take care of the rest. Somehow, that promise evolved into "here are 153 ways to provision 200+ resources via yaml". And then CDK came along, and made that process friendlier for developers, but it still requires learning how to code resources in a specific framework. So here's a novel idea:

Forget code, at least when it comes to your infrastructure! Save it for your Lambda logic and the things that differentiate your application. The world doesn't need more Terraform experts, but it does need cloud architects and devOps engineers who can quickly spin up infrastructure.

Oh, and with App Composer you get the bonus of being able to visualize existing architectures too, which is a killer feature when onboarding new team members:

Anyway, I’m mostly excited to finally be able to talk about what I’ve been working on the past ~8 months 😅 App Composer is a frontend-only, canvas-based service, so stay tuned if you want to know more about how we actually built the thing.

Now excuse me while I go sleep for a week.