Skip to main content

AWS Amplify as low-code for infrastructure

[PLACEHOLDER]
Image

Low-code development platforms are dominating many conversations lately. Many believe that low-code development platforms will account for millions of USD in revenue in the next five (5) years. An article by Forbes highlights that “it will account for more than 65% of application development activity by 2024”. Some believe it will be the answer to all their development needs.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels

 But low-code is not a new concept. The difference now is that its audience has amplified. For developers (or even advanced users) who have been in the Microsoft  ecosystem for a while have already experienced the assembly of software solutions with little effort using tools such as Microsoft Excel, Access, Visual Studio (assembling forms) and others.

Putting Microsoft aside, and prior to this “low-code revolution” which has reached high altitude in the last couple of years, there have been many online veterans which allow a user to assemble simple to medium complexity applications in different areas:

  • Marketing automation with low to no code
  • Websites
  • Database management
  • AI
  • Work management
  • e-commerce
  • Others
- Microsoft, Mendix, Salesforce, Wix -
-   Zoho, outsystems, Stripe, Shopify  -

 

Before we go any further with this article let us answer the question of what is a low-code/no-code platform? 

Low-code/no-code is a platform that provides non-technical, and technical users the tools to develop applications that are operational (at least at a “vanilla state”), or require additional coding for specific elements, with less effort (and knowledge) that is needed for the traditional way of producing code. The LCDP (Low Code Development Platforms) creates applications using a graphical interface, which the consumer uses for assembling the desired functionalities.

The focus of this article

In this article I will focus on one of my own experiences under the low-code umbrella where I leveraged cloud computing services. I chose Amazon AWS services in the space of “code as infrastructure”. The three (3) items I would like to highlight before we start:

  1. This falls into the low-code end that requires expertise
  2. We are focusing on “code as infrastructure”, with fewer lines of code possible. This is to accelerate and facilitate the DevOps for some app use cases
  3. If you are looking for the no code/low code solutioning, similar to Microsoft PowerApps from Amazon AWS then I suggest to look at Amazon HoneyCode

The problem statement in our hands was to build a webapp (mobile first) as a gift to our colleagues. The pandemic has brought many challenges around the globe and we wanted to let our team members abroad know that we were here for them. Without going into details, the solution was inspired by the #virtualhug movement. As we continued working on our concept, we landed on the following paragraph that defined the app: “A virtual hug a day, keeps the sorrow away! Just the act of imagining that you are hugging someone can make you feel positive, empathetic and less stressed.” 

The premise was to deliver this webapp in seven (7) days, easy to deploy, but without spending too much time on setting the deployment architecture. There was no Content Management System (CMS) system in place, but it should be quick and easy to make content updates. Those updates should reflect on production relatively quickly for our audience to view on the webapp.

We had a core team of three (3) people for this delivery: 

  1. A project manager (PM) for coordination
  2. A designer, to help me in bringing the concept into the webapp Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
  3. Me as the sponsor and developer

As I said before, I needed to reduce efforts on the development and the deployment. Therefore I turned to Amazon AWS for a "serverless" approach, and with the hope to find my answers for an easy deployment process.

The stack that we ended up using was:

  • NuxtJS
  • AWS S3
  • AWS Amplify
  • AWS CloudFormation
  • Microsoft Visual Code as the editor

The hero of this article is AWS Amplify, which took care of many lines of code, which without a tool like this, I would have had to write in order to set up “code as infrastructure” and host the webapp.

Note: This is not a blog for teaching AWS Amplify and Cloudformation. If you are looking for that then I would recommend the ThemePark course provided by Amazon AWS: https://www.eventbox.dev/published/lesson/innovator-island/0-introduction/1-overview.html 

Checkpoint...

If you have reached this point of the article then you might be thinking “this looks advanced, where is the low-code in this stack!?”. I want to remind you that this article is focusing on the DevOps aspect. I hope things are a bit clearer as you read the next few paragraphs.

What is AWS Amplify?

Based on Amazon AWS definition: “AWS Amplify is a set of tools and services that can be used together or on their own, to help front-end web and mobile developers build scalable full stack applications, powered by AWS. With Amplify, you can configure app backends and connect your apps in minutes, deploy static web apps in a few clicks, and easily manage app content outside the AWS console. Amplify supports popular web frameworks including JavaScript, React, Angular, Vue, Next.js, and mobile platforms including Android, iOS, React Native, Ionic, Flutter.”

How did we leverage AWS Amplify for the deployment, in a low-code approach?

I followed the vanilla commands after creating the required AWS Role using the AWS Management Console, and installing the AWS Amplify-CLI on my laptop, where my project resided. With it I was able to have within minutes:

  1. Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline
  2. CI/CD connected to my code repository, which is on Bitbucket (outside of AWS)
  3. Hosting the app in an UAT environment leveraging the AWS S3 bucket
  4. The CloudFormation which is used for the “code as infrastructure” for the provisioning

The provisioning, and the many scripts, and the integrations, were all made with just a few command line prompts removing hours of me putting together this code pipeline.




 Finally, it was great to see that we exceeded our expectations as we were able to successfully deploy the webapp to production two (2) days earlier, shrinking our timeline from seven (7) to five (5) days.

Trending posts

Democratizing AI

Democratizing AI is all about empowering others to use it, by making it available to them. Audiences, such as marketers in a company, will be able to access AI capabilities as part of their MarTech solutions, without the need of being technical. It could also be schools, where the younger generations are learning how to use it in responsible, secure, innovative, and creative ways. This is the year where companies, after discovery phases and teams experimenting, are looking to activate and take advantage of the AI advances. Generated with Microsoft Designer   And so, questions emerge, such as “What to democratize when leveraging AI?” There are common scenarios, as well as specific ones, that will depend on the company, and the industry they belong to. A common scenario, seen in many industries, when democratizing data is the data visualization and reporting . In digital marketing, as an example, data scientists and data analysts can automate reporting, making them available to the c...
Read more

The value of listening

 Have you ever been in a conversation that you feel at best is just a waste of time; at worst, that the other person does not care? Have you been the messenger in some of them, the recipient in another? We’ve all been there; at times with family, with friends, at work. When at work, has this ever happened to you in a group meeting, at a one-on-one; when giving or receiving feedback?   Photo by Christina Morillo via Pexels   I knew the type of manager I wanted to be from the start of my mentorship. As I continued to navigate the waters, it became increasingly clear that the path I had chosen was appropriate, and therefore, the type of future colleagues I wanted to be surrounded by, and the type of mentors I wanted to continue seeking guidance from.  For me, the path has always been of being a leader over a manager. I believe I can attribute that, first and foremost, to my family’s values and  principles, and the way my parents raised us. Secondly, my path in the ...
Read more

AI Agents is the new thing to talk about

Tech is evolving faster than ever in this AI era, that it feels every week there is something new to talk about, and what you learn weeks back is no longer relevant, or “that AI tools” already has gone through changes that you need to catch up with in order to stay relevant.  Fear not, embrace the challenges and learnings, and find applications for it that are good and ethical for this present, and the hereafter.  The new “craze” is AI agents, and for good reason!  Image generated with NightCafe In contrast with AI chatbots, an AI agent can execute tasks on your behalf. If you are thinking “ that this could be agents that we leave running independently for many days for a group of deliveries ”… Well then you are correct! Are there risks? Should we talk about trust and accountability? The answer for both is yes. I already hinted at it a couple of paragraphs above, when I wrote “ good and ethical ”. AI (Artificial Intelligence) agents are software that work autonomously,...
Read more

SRE, DevOps and ITOps

 If you are wondering what the differences between the SRE and DevOps are, as well as how these roles work with ITOps within an organisation then you are not alone; and best of all you are on the right blog post. Often enough business units in a company get confused, assigning the ServiceNow or Jira tickets or any other ticketing system of your preference, to the wrong group, and even having the incorrect expectations when doing resourcing. Let us go through definitions, insights and scenarios that will help you understand the difference. DevOps software development operations - AI Generated When it comes to DevOps and SRE, then you might be wondering which practice came first. While SRE may have originated a bit earlier, internally at Google, DevOps came first publicly as a practice and started to be used by companies. A few years later was when Google decided to open SRE to the world after the publication of the "Site Reliability Engineering" book. Therefore, technically sp...
Read more

This blog uses cookies to improve your browsing experience. Simple analytics might be in place for pageviews purposes. They are harmless and never personally identify you.

Agreed