AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
AWS Abstracts Your Infrastructure—Let Codeless Abstract Your Whole App Stack
By Bassam Chaptini, Chief Technology Officer – Unqork
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By providing on-demand cloud computing at scale, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has revolutionized enterprise computing.
Businesses no longer have to worry about purchasing hardware, maintaining operating systems, or planning for capacity. Companies can instantly spin up hundreds or thousands of servers in minutes—and then focus their resources on building great applications, knowing AWS will handle scaling as well as distribution to users.
Pioneered by AWS, serverless architecture has transformed enterprise development. Now, codeless architecture—a new open standard for application development spearheaded by AWS Partner Unqork—is doing for your tech stack what AWS has done for servers.
With codeless architecture, businesses can rapidly build and effectively manage sophisticated, enterprise-grade software in an entirely visual user interface (UI). You never have to worry about any of the code in underlying legacy applications or third-party systems. In fact, you manage your entire digital ecosystem from a single pane of glass.
From No-Code to Codeless Architecture
Just as you need a great cloud partner like AWS in order to go serverless, you need a robust no-code provider like Unqork to take full advantage of codeless architecture. “No-code” has become a buzz term recently, but not all no-code platforms are created alike.
Many low-code and no-code platforms on the market are limited to specific (and not always flexible) use cases. Unqork has changed that by building the first no-code application platform for the enterprise. It provides everything you need to build complex software that is fully customized to your business’s unique needs—even in highly regulated industries such as insurance, financial services, government services, and healthcare.
Earlier no-code platforms provided a limited set of capabilities that are pre-coded (web builders from the 1990s could technically be called “no-code”). Unqork’s platform goes much further. It abstracts all relevant application elements into configurable units, representing user-facing elements, backend logic, and integrations with other legacy systems (including those designed in code), third-party services, and applications built without code. All those pieces can be orchestrated in a completely visual UI.
If you want to understand what’s going on underneath the hood, you can check out this whitepaper about codeless architecture.
As an AWS customer, you never need to know when a physical server is being updated, or even where it lives. As a codeless developer, you can build modern apps with complex business workflows without worrying about, or even seeing, underlying code.
“Like virtual data storage, a codeless architecture would separate application functionality from the underlying infrastructure that supports it,” writes Thomas Davenport, a fellow of the MIT Initiative for the Digital Economy and senior advisor to Deloitte Analytics.
All the Things You No Longer Have to Do
Even if you tap into the power of the cloud with AWS, traditional application development still requires many time-consuming steps, even with low-code and many so-called no-code platforms, including:
- Selecting the right tools: You need to determine the right set of tools for a specific project, from databases and programming language to third-party functionality.
- Building a platform: You need to architect and manage your development platform.
- Deciphering legacy code: You may have to unravel years or even decades of existing legacy code—often poorly documented and created by people who have since left the organization—to ensure interoperability.
- Creating new code: You have to translate application concepts and business requirements, step-by-step, into lines and lines of code. Even low-code can’t take all this work off your plate.
- Maintaining that code: Without codeless architecture, each line of code is more stuff for you to manage in the future.
- Squashing bugs: Ah, the joy.
With codeless, you can build a proof of concept in days and robust applications in a matter of weeks. That’s because Unqork’s codeless platform eliminates each of the time-consuming steps listed above.
Working with Unqork’s platform means:
- No tools to choose: A codeless platform provides all of the tools you need to build, monitor, and deploy any application—all in a single, unified workspace.
- No platform to architect or SLDC to manage: All that work is done by the codeless platform provider.
- No need to understand the underlying code: Thanks to abstraction and componentization, you have no need to dig into underlying code.
- No new code to write: You never have to translate requirements into code. Development is entirely visual.
- No new code to maintain: You never write a new line of code that will require management down the line.
- Massive reduction in new bugs: You reduce bugs up to 600x by eliminating new code.
Digital Ecosystem Behind a Single Pane of Glass
One of the great advantages AWS offers is the ability to manage your AWS environment from a single, unified, and intuitive pane of glass. You can do it all without having to worry about the underlying server ecosystem.
In the same way, the Unqork platform lets you unify your entire application infrastructure—including modern and legacy applications, plus third-party systems—within a single workspace in which you can complex business workflows across your entire ecosystem.
As one of Unqork’s partners says, their clients can “wrap” their underlying infrastructure thanks to ease of integration. You can quickly build a new custom interface for legacy systems, meaning you can create modern applications, without ripping or replacing or even updating underlying applications. Instead, you can focus on building sophisticated applications atop them.
In many cases—for example, when Unqork partners upgrade their own underlying systems—all necessary changes are handled by Unqork. Meanwhile, your application doesn’t miss a beat.
“If, for example, the world figures out how to broadly apply quantum computing, with a codeless architecture the backend could probably work with qubits instead of the traditional bits and bytes,” writes Thomas Davenport, the MIT fellow.
Here’s an example: When Unqork built its platform four years ago, Angular was a great choice of framework. Bbecause Unqork is an application platform, all the software that customers built on its platform used Angular as well.
Last year, Unqork decided to move from Angular to React, because React is lighter, more performant, and has more libraries and support, among other advantages. Once the process is complete, customers’ applications will all be updated to the latest framework, without them having to lift a finger.
Serverless and Codeless: Better Together
The emergence of codeless architecture has the potential to transform application development in much the same way that cloud computing, led by AWS, has transformed enterprise computing.
By combining the cloud capabilities of AWS and the application stack capabilities of Unqork, you can take a whole bunch of high-volume technical details—from setting up a cloud farm to updating APIs across your entire ecosystem—off your to-do list. When you do, you can focus more on end goals instead of all the little steps it takes to get there.
If you’d like to learn more about Unqork’s no-code platform, visit Unqork’s AWS Marketplace listing or request a demo.
The content and opinions in this blog are those of the third-party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.
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Unqork – AWS Partner Spotlight
Unqork is an AWS Partner and no-code application platform that helps organizations build enterprise-grade software faster, avoid legacy, reduce production issues, and lower total cost of ownership.