LowCode, NoCode, HoneyCode. Do we still need developers?

For years we’ve been watching the natural trend of how cloud providers generalise web development. Starting with single blocks which became cloud services like authentication, API management or devops orchestration, moving toward meta-services like Amplify for web development, Glue for big data processing, Azure DevOps or AWS Migration Hub for all the on-premise to cloud possibilities. Once you have robust managed services for each and every use case, it’s quite straightforward to move on and build new meta services on top of it.

The basis for meta-services

With increasing the level of abstraction the necessity of writing low-level configurations or even code becomes obsolete. You can just build your business logic directly using an intuitive UI and leave the technical implementation on managed services which are configured based on best practices, smart algorithms or machine learning. Excellent examples are S3 intelligent tier, where your storage plan is chosen automatically based on usage of data, or EC2 predictive scaling, which predicts your load and adjusts respectively the capacity.

But it was not always so. You can maybe remind AWS Beanstalk — an attempt to build everything in place. It turned out to be monstrous and not quite useful and flexible. So such an evolution of course takes time to get things mature.

So let’s have a look at the actual AWS “Studio” services to better understand the status quo.

AWS Amplify Studio

Amplify is a WebDev/Frontend service and set of frontend libraries from AWS.

For the more deep dive have a look at my post regarding new Amplify features. In general, now you can build data models and UI just in the browser, connect data sources, attach authentication, manage your deployment process and content and has even integration with Figma. It reminds the next generation of Beanstalk but this time it’s just a beautiful composition of multiple managed services like AppSync, Dynamo, Amplify, Cloudformation etc. As an artefact you get generated code that can be later adjusted. So it can be considered as low-code solution.

AWS Glue Studio

Glue is a managed Spark service for Big Data processing.

Glue Studio is the next generation of the Glue Jobs constructor which was an optional way to create new jobs previously. Now you have more settings but in general it allows you to connect different data sources and map fields, which is enough for the most of simple ETL jobs. You can get a ready solution without writing a line of code. But still of course there is an option to get a boilerplate code and adopt it. So let’s call it low-code/no-code

StepFunctions Workflow Studio

StepFunctions is a state machine designed by AWS and aimed to declaratively build complex workflows.

So this is here not only one another step for building architectures using just UI, but also a long awaited improvement from AWS in terms of workflow management. The way you used to build StepFunction workflows was always writing huge JSON files. And if in the beginning you can just take some examples and adapt them, later when you have a 1k lines JSON definition it’s extremely hard to adjust and even more to add some new logic in between.

and couple more

Amazon Nimble Studio

Nimble Studio is a new service that empowers creative studios to produce visual effects, animation, and interactive content from storyboard sketch to final deliverable, entirely in the cloud.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas

SageMaker Canvas is a new visual, no code capability that allows business analysts to build ML models and generate accurate predictions without writing code or requiring ML expertise.

Amazon HoneyCode

HoneyCode was announced on 24 June 2020 as the first completely no-code Service. Since you’re familiar with Excel, your can manage the data for your mobile or web application

Using UI later you can arrange the existing data and build an interface

HoneyCode is a separate service, not integrated directly to AWS Console, but you can also connect your existing AWS services with the HoneyCode App via Zapier or Amazon AppFlow.

Considering the last great improvements of AWS Amplify, HoneyCode and Amplify can eventually compete with each other. But for now HoneyCode allows you to click a working app really just in minutes, which might be perfect for demos or prototypes.

Conclusion

We ended up with services where you just need to be familiar with excel sheets a bit to be able to build a real app. So coming back to the question in the title, do we still need developers?

The thing is, that a real project is a long journey. Nobody knows in advance which features will suddenly come in future. So understanding the bricks of your high-level services are still essential to be able to build a real world app and stay flexible. That means you should understand how things like different types of communication, databases or authentication systems work.

So are you still a developer in this case? Yes and no. Of course you still develop apps, and one cannot say that scope of know-how now is somehow reduced, we can just build more and faster than earlier. But what is more or less getting clear is that the necessity of a low-level programming/configuration of usual things becomes definitely less actual as it was the last 10 years.

We as Thinkport will help you to build applications of any level of complexity. Check out workshops!