AWS Application Composer to Visualize and Create Serverless Workloads Now Generally Available

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AWS Application Composer, a visual builder that enables users to compose and configure serverless applications from AWS services backed by deployment-ready infrastructure as code (IaC), is now generally available (GA).

The GA release follows the service preview during the AWS re:Invent conference last year, including several improvements based on customer feedback. These improvements are:

• UI improvements with the size of resource cards that have been reduced and allowing users to zoom in and out and zoom to fit buttons to show the entire screen or the desired zoom level
• enhanced integration with Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• a Change Inspector feature that shows a visual breakdown of template changes between two resources connected on the canvas

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-application-composer-now-generally-available-visually-build-serverless-applications-quickly/

Users can start with AWS Application Composer by choosing Open demo in the AWS Management Console, which shows a simple cart application with Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB resources. In addition, the AWS Application Composer works with the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI for application deployment, which allows an application to be created through AWS Application Composer and then deployed using the SAM CLI.

Channy Chun, a principal developer advocate for AWS, outlines several real-world scenarios for AWS Application Composer in an AWS news blog post, such as:

• Building a prototype of serverless applications
• Reviewing and collaboratively evolving existing serverless projects
• Generating diagrams for documentation or Wikis
• Onboarding new team members to a project
• Reducing the first steps to deploy something in an AWS account

Banjo Obayomi, a senior developer advocate at AWS, concluded in a BuildOn.AWS blog post:

By leveraging AWS Application Composer and AWS SAM, developers can focus on creating code instead of writing YAML and fiddling with IAM policies and other tedious "grunt work."

Regarding the GA release Matthew Bonig, a chief cloud architect at Defiance Digital, tweeted:

App Composer is GA but doesn't support reading .json CloudFormation files.
Or does it!? Just rename your file to .yml, and it works.

Ryan Coleman, an AWS PM for AWS Application Composer and AWS SAM, responded:

:) classic case of tech outpacing the DX. We're certainly planning to clean this up, so json/yaml template interop just works intuitively, but I don't have a date yet.

Currently, AWS Application Composer is available in the US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), and Europe (Stockholm) regions, adding three more regions to the six regions available during preview. More details on working with AWS Application Composer is available in the developer guide.

Related Topics:

• Development
• Architecture & Design
• DevOps
• AWS
• Architecture Documentation
• Architecture
• Amazon
• Deployment
• Cloud
• AWS Lambda

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