The cloud is firmly established as a crucial element of a digital-first strategy, as it empowers organizations to be more flexible, resilient, and agile. But developing for the cloud is still far from easy. Challenges are aplenty, from hiring skilled and experienced cloud architects, to addressing security constraints, to the complexity of navigating through an ever-growing market of web services.
But what if there was a way to accelerate app development in the cloud while benefiting from the services and expertise of a leading cloud provider like AWS?
OutSystems and AWS: Like Peanut Butter and Jelly
Whether you like peanut butter and jelly or not, OutSystems and AWS together empower organizations to build applications in a much more efficient and productive way with the confidence they’ll meet the most stringent requirements for scalability, reliability, availability, and security.
On the one hand, you have OutSystems, a high-performance low-code platform catered to pro-developers and designed to accelerate software development. It does so by automating common, repetitive tasks so that developers can focus on coding that extra mile that truly makes the difference between a good application and a great one.
On the other, you have AWS which combines a vast catalog of fully-featured web services with a vibrant community of partners, giving organizations the flexibility to build the software they need and innovate faster.
By combining the power of the two, you're able to create not just applications but powerful experiences that take advantage of the large and comprehensive service portfolio of AWS.
Using Amazon Web Services in OutSystems Applications
OutSystems provides a wide range of application patterns and AI algorithms to accelerate development and enable developers with a much more efficient way of crafting software.
For cloud development, in particular, OutSystems offers several cloud connectors and accelerators to support rapid application development for the AWS cloud.
How do they differ, and when should you use each? Let’s take a look.
AWS Connectors
Available in the OutSystems Forge (our code repository), developers can find several AWS connectors to integrate specific AWS services into apps built with OutSystems quickly. These connectors work as APIs and wrap up the complexity of integrating an application to an AWS web service.
Today, we have 11 AWS connectors created by our Engineering team fully supported by OutSystems.
So, if you’re already familiar with AWS services and want to incorporate them into your OutSystems apps, just go to the Forge, and search for the connector you’re looking for.
The available connectors include:
Cloud Accelerators
For those who are not sure about the best use case for the several AWS services — because, let’s be honest, there are 200+ AWS services to choose from and unless you’re an AWS solution architect, you most likely won’t be familiar with all of them — we’ve created Cloud Accelerators.
These accelerators represent a practical example of how to use the connectors I mentioned above.
All accelerators include:
- Components
- Sample app
- Documentation
- With prescriptive guidance on how to set-up
- With an architecture reference to allow customization
If you think of a car, while the connectors are the screws, bolts, rims, the accelerators are large modules of the vehicle, like the optimized electric drivetrain, the 360 camera system, or the integrated entertainment system.
Our Cloud Accelerators include a solution-specific code and architectural guidance and comprehensive documentation but they are also open so that you can adjust them to your business’s specific requirements.
At the moment, we have 5 Cloud Accelerators available that cover key business initiatives, from customer experience and process automation to workplace innovation and app modernization use cases.
Ready to Go to the Cloud (Nine)?
OutSystems and AWS's mission is to provide developers across all company sizes, and industries with an accelerated path to building modern cloud applications fast, right, and for future change. And these connectors and accelerators play a key part in empowering every company to innovate through software at the speed their business and customers demand.
To learn more about our partnership with AWS and our cloud connectors and accelerators, take a look at our additional resources. In addition to that, I invite you to learn more about how a high-performance low-code platform empowers developers to create massively scalable and secure cloud apps in the Cloud Innovation Summit — now available on-demand.
Additional Resources
