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Organizations often struggle to solve business problems in areas such as claims processing, inventory tracking, and project approvals. Custom business applications can provide solutions to solve these problems and enable organizations to work more efficiently, but until now they have required specialized development teams to build and maintain. Yet development capacity is often lacking or too expensive, leaving companies to use inefficient tools and processes.
Today we are announcing the public preview of AWS App Studio, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) service that creates enterprise-grade applications in minutes using natural language, with no software development skills required.
Let's take a quick look at what you can do with App Studio. Once you're signed in to App Studio, Create a new app Use our generation AI assistant: explain that you need a project approvals app, and App Studio will generate an app with a user interface, data model, and business logic. The entire app generation process takes just a few minutes.
Note: The animation above shows the flow at an accelerated speed for demonstration purposes.
While writing this article, I realized that App Studio is useful for a variety of technical professionals. IT project managers, data engineers, and enterprise architects can use App Studio to create and manage secure business applications in minutes instead of days. App Studio helps organizations build end-to-end custom applications and has two primary user roles:
- builder – Builders group members can create, build, and share applications. If you are interested in learning more about the application building process, skip to the section immediately following “Using App Studio as a Builder: Creating an Application.”
- Administrator – Members of this group can manage groups and roles, create and edit connectors, and maintain visibility into other apps built in the organization. In addition to these permissions, Administrators can also build their own apps. If you want to learn more about enabling and configuring App Studio and what you can do as an Administrator, continue to the Getting Started with AWS App Studio section.
Using App Studio as a builder: Creating an application
As a builder, you can create secure applications using App Studio's generative AI-powered, low-code building environment. First, you describe the application you want in natural language, such as “build an application to review and process invoices.” App Studio then generates the application with the data model, business logic, and multi-page UI.
Now comes the fun part: it's time to build your app in App Studio. Builder Hub Select a page and click Create an app.
You name it, there are two options for building your app: Generate apps with AI or Starting from scratchselect Generate apps with AI.
On the next page, you can start building your app by simply writing what you want in the text box, or you can select a sample prompt available on the right panel.
Then App Studio will prepare your app requirements. You can refine the prompts and review the updated requirements to better plan your application. If you are happy with the results, Generate the appApp Studio will then generate the application.
This was a positive experience for me when I started building apps with App Studio. The generative AI capabilities built into App Studio generated apps in minutes, compared to hours or even days it would have taken to achieve the same results using other tools.
After a few minutes your app is ready, and App Studio also provides a quick tutorial to help you navigate and understand the different areas.
App Studio has three main areas: page, Automationand dataI always like to start building an app by defining the data model first. data section.
In data In this section, you can model your application data using a managed data store backed by DynamoDB or an available data connector. Because we chose to let AI generate this app, all of the data entities are defined for us. If we chose to do it manually, we would need to create entities to represent the different data tables and field types for our application.
Once you are happy with your data entities, you can build a visual page. This is the area where you can create a UI for your users. You can add and arrange components such as tables, forms, buttons, and more to create a tailored experience for your end users.
To see a live preview while you build your app, previewThis helps you test the layout and functionality of your application.
But for me, the most notable of these three areas is AutomationAutomations allow you to define rules, workflows, and actions that define or extend the business logic of your application. Because I chose to build this application using App Studio's generate AI assistant, several different automations required for my application were automatically created and connected.
For example, every time a new project is submitted, an action can be triggered to create the project and send a notification email.
You can also extend your business logic by calling API callouts, AWS Lambda, or other AWS services. In addition to creating a project, you also want to archive the project in flat file format to an S3 bucket. To do this, you also need to do some processing, but you already have the functionality built into your existing Lambda function.
here, Invoke Lambdaas shown in the previous screenshot. Then, connector, Function nameand the Feature Events The payload to pass to an existing Lambda function.
Finally, once you are happy with all your UI pages, data entities, and automations, you can selectively publish them. Release. App test or production Environments, so you can test your application before pushing it to production.
The previous section describes the app building experience from the builder's perspective, but configuring and managing App Studio itself is an important responsibility for administrators and builders. Here's how to get started with App Studio:
Get started with AWS App Studio
AWS App Studio is integrated with AWS IAM Identity Center, making it easy to secure access with the flexibility of integrating with your existing Single Sign-On (SSO) or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). App Studio also manages the deployment and operation of your applications, reducing the time and effort required to operate your applications. You can now spend more time adding features to your applications and customizing them to meet your users' needs.
Before you can use App Studio to create an application, the service must be enabled. Here's how an administrator sets up an App Studio instance:
First, go to the App Studio Admin Console and start.
As mentioned above, App Studio is integrated with IAM Identity Center and will automatically detect if you have an existing organization instance in IAM Identity Center. For more information on the difference between organization and account instances in IDC, see the Managing Organizations and Account Instances page in IAM Identity Center.
In this case, since you don't have an organization instance, App Studio will guide you through the process of creating an account instance in the IAM Identity Center. Here, as an administrator, Create an account instance.
In the next section, Create users and groups and add them to App StudioYou need to define both an administrator group and a builder group. In this section, you add yourself as an administrator, and later you add users to the builder group.
The final part of the onboarding process is understand Select in the section setting.
Once the onboarding process is complete, account My App Studio Page Active You are now ready to use and have a unique App Studio instance URL that you can access.
This onboarding scenario shows you how to get started without a pre-configured instance of IAM Identity Center, to understand how to use an existing IAM Identity Center instance, see the Create and configure your first App Studio instance page.
Now that App Studio has created your AWS IAM Identity Center account instance, you will receive an email with instructions to sign in to App Studio. After selecting the link, you will need to create a password for your account and define Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to enhance your account's security posture.
You can then sign in to App Studio.
Add additional users (optional)
App Studio uses AWS IAM Identity Center to manage users and groups, which means if you need to invite additional users to your App Studio instance, you must do so in IAM Identity Center.
For example, here is a list of my users, and I can add more users by selecting them. Add a userOnce a user has been added, they will receive an email with instructions on how to activate their account.
If you need to create additional groups, Create a group To group page. The following screenshot shows the groups defined for your account instance in IAM Identity Center.
Using AWS App Studio as an Administrator
Now switch to App Studio and sign in as an administrator. Here you will see two main sections: Management Hub and Builder Hub.
As an administrator, you can grant users access to App Studio by associating existing user groups with roles. role section:
To map the groups you created in the IAM Identity Center, Add Group Select Group Identifier and roleThere are three roles you can set: Administrator, Builder and App User. To understand the difference between each role, please see the Managing Access and Roles in App Studio page.
Administrators can incorporate various data sources into App Studio using connectors. App Studio has built-in connectors to integrate with AWS services such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), etc. It also has a built-in connector for Salesforce, as well as generic API and OpenAPI connectors to integrate with third-party services.
Additionally, App Studio automatically created a managed DynamoDB connector to get you started, and you can create additional connectors if you choose. Create a connector.
You can create other connectors to AWS services on this page. If you need other AWS services, Other AWS ServicesFor information on how to define an IAM role for a connector, see Connecting App Studio to other services using connectors.
Join the preview
AWS App Studio is currently in preview and can be accessed in the US West (Oregon) AWS Region, but applications can connect to data in other AWS Regions.
Use AWS App Studio to build secure, scalable, and performant custom business applications to modernize and streamline mission-critical tasks. Learn more about all features on the AWS App Studio documentation page and join the conversation in the #aws-app-studio channel in the AWS Developers Slack workspace.
Happy building,
Donny
Update 7/12/2024: The Builder and Admin sections have been rearranged.
