The now generally available AWS Application Composer is a visual builder that enables users to compose and configure serverless applications from AWS services backed by deployment-ready infrastructure as code (IaC).
AWS Application Composer allows for building prototypes of serverless applications and collaboratively reviewing them, generating diagrams for documentation or Wikis, and onboarding new team members to a project, according to Amazon.
“Developers that never used serverless before, how do they know where to start? Which services do they need? How do they work together? We really wanted to make this easier. AWS Application Composer simplifies and accelerates the architecting, configuring, and building of serverless applications,” Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com said at the re:Invent 2022 keynote, where the application was first previewed.
Since the initial announcements, AWS Application Composer has received many improvements.
One such improvement is a new feature that improves how to work with Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues. By removing the need to route requests through an AWS Lambda function and decreasing the lines of code, Amazon API Gateway resources can now be directly connected to Amazon SQS, which increases reliability.
Also, a new Change Inspector provides a visual breakdown of template changes between two resources when they are connected on the canvas.
There have been some notable improvements to the UI since the preview. The size of resource cards has been reduced and users can zoom in and out and zoom to fit buttons to show the entire screen or the desired zoom level.
