AWS App Development - definition & overview

AWS equips developers and administrators with a broad range of valuable products that embrace modern application development practices. You can use AWS app development tools to build applications and microservices.

Modern application development is designing, building, and managing applications through rapid innovation cycles. This approach increases the agility of your teams and the reliability, security, and scalability of your apps.

Amazon app development offerings increasingly blur the line between cloud and on-premise assets and procedures and are part of a highly dynamic picture that sees many enterprises employing different tools to assist at each stage of the software development lifecycle.

There are a few AWS development services at the forefront of these efforts:

1. AWS CodePipeline: A continuous delivery service that enables fast and reliable application updates. It orchestrates the build, test, and deployment workflow and helps optimize the entire process by providing strong visualization, automation capabilities, and diagnostic information.
2. AWS CodeCommit: A cloud-based source code control system that provides enterprises with private, scalable, and secure Git repositories, which also integrate with the on-premise Git tools that may already be in production.

3. AWS CodeDeploy: A cloud-hosted service that automates the vital job of deploying code to any destination, including on-premise computing resources. This approach helps reduce potential errors and scales thousands of servers.

4. AWS Amplify: An AWS mobile app development platform for building secure, scalable web and mobile applications. With this toolchain, you can create and manage all essential services for a mobile application.

5. AWS Lambda: An AWS serverless computing service that allows you to run code without provisioning or managing infrastructure. Write and upload code as a .zip file or container image in response to events, and Lambda will automatically manage the underlying compute resources for you.

Until recently, AWS had primarily served as a traditional cloud computing platform not integrated with on-premise processes and resources. However, products like AWS CodeDeploy are changing this perception, and Amazon will likely continue its march towards incorporating and servicing the entire IT portfolio—regardless of where it’s hosted.

Despite these advances, many enterprises will continue to rely on highly focused external solutions that have repeatedly demonstrated their effectiveness.

This array of specialized technologies—open source and proprietary—addresses the entire software lifecycle, including design, development, testing, release, and performance management. Most of these solutions—and the rich ecosystem of products and services they’ve spawned—are well integrated with AWS but enable customers to maintain independence and avoid vendor lock-in. They offer highly flexible deployment alternatives (such as on-premises, cloud, or both) tailored to specific client requirements.

Third-party app development features

• Targeted, best-of-breed solutions

• Cross-language capabilities

• Open-source baseline with optional commercial extensions

• Support for different development styles

• Automatic build generation

• Comprehensive version control

• No single point of failure

• Leverage distributed processing

• Extensible via a plugin architecture

Atlassian supplies software for the entire application development lifecycle. Bamboo provides continuous integration, deployment and release management capabilities. BitBucket encourages team code collaboration and assists with Git repository management.

GitHub fosters a fast, flexible, and collaborative development process useful for individuals and teams. By hosting and managing code on GitHub, developers can keep their work private or share it with the world.

Jenkins is the leading open-source automation server. It provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project.

The creators and top contributors of Jenkins developed CloudBees. It adds enterprise-class security, stability and manageability.

JFrog provides a world-class infrastructure for software management and distribution. This includes cloud-based as well as on-premises deployment options.

With dozens of AWS service options from Amazon’s web developer stack and third parties, choosing the best app development tools requires understanding your needs. Below is a list of questions to help you choose the best AWS tools for DevOps, engineering, and development.

• What type of application are you building?

• How much data do you plan to use?

• Where do you plan on hosting your application?

• What AWS monitoring tools do you plan to use?

• What type of development environment will you be using?

• What type of development methodology will you use?

• How large is your engineering team?

• Where is your development team located?

• What type of deployment methodology will you use?

Sumo Logic’s analytics platform mirrors Amazon Web Services. We help organizations gain the instant visibility they require to confidently pursue and enable dynamic modern cloud applications to pursue and enable dynamic modern cloud applications. Data must be mastered, integrated, and analyzed to gain the situational awareness that drives a proactive security posture. Continuous AWS monitoring and real-time visibility from Sumo Logic help secure your AWS cloud apps.

Additional AWS app development resources

For additional resources on AWS services, use the list below:

• AWS monitoring

• AWS EC2

• AWS S3

• AWS CodeDeploy

• AWS CodePipeline