Generative AI is everywhere these days, but Amazon Web Services has been perceived in some circles as being late to the game. In reality it’s still early, and the market is still shaking out. On Wednesday, AWS might have raised its generative AI street cred with a new tool called App Studio.
App Studio promises to help you create an enterprise software application from a written prompt. That’s correct: You simply describe the program you want, and AWS says it will write the code for you without the need for any professional developers.
“App Studio is for technical folks who have technical expertise but are not professional developers, and we’re enabling them to build enterprise-grade apps,” Sriram Devanathan, GM of Amazon Q Apps and AWS App Studio, told TechCrunch.
Amazon defines enterprise apps as having multiple UI pages with the ability to pull from multiple data sources, perform complex operations like joins and filters, and embed business logic in them.
It is aimed at IT professionals, data engineers and enterprise architects, even product managers who might lack coding skills but have the requisite company knowledge to understand what kinds of internal software applications they might need. The company is hoping to enable these employees to build applications by describing the application they need and the data sources they wish to use.
Examples of the types of applications include an inventory-tracking system or claims approval process. The user starts by entering the name of an application, calling the data sources and then describing the application they want to build. The system comes with some sample prompts to help, but users can enter an ad hoc description if they wish.
It then builds a list of requirements for the application and what it will do, based on the description. The user can refine these requirements by interacting with the generative AI. In that way, it’s not unlike a lot of no-code tools that preceded it, but Devanathan says it is different.
“Where App Studio is different is in the way we use GenAI to really reduce your learning curve. I’d say there’s almost no learning curve. The typical no-code tools you have to understand their paradigm. You have to understand the visual interface. You kind of have to really, over time, build some expertise,” he said.
Once the application is complete, it goes through a mini DevOps pipeline where it can be tested before going into production. In terms of identity, security and governance, and other requirements any enterprise would have for applications being deployed, the administrator can link to existing systems when setting up the App Studio. When it gets deployed, AWS handles all of that on the back end for the customer, based on the information entered by the admin.
App Studio uses multiple models running on Amazon Bedrock, including Amazon Titan and Anthropic, depending on the job, according to Devanathan.
App Studio is available in preview starting Wednesday.