The no code and low code development world is accelerating as new entrants and new communities are becoming more vocal. In all of this noise we almost missed a great piece of reporting from GeekWire earlier this year on AWS. “AWS for Everyone” popped up across LinkedIn as AWS binged on additional engineering hires. Since GeekWire’s reporting it appears that AWS made the decision to bury the project from the publics eye with some mandated LinkedIn profile changes.
Tom Krazit, GeekWire author, snapped screenshots of these profiles before the AWS employees changed their profile.
Conspiracy theories aside, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure are all competing for market share. Alibaba and other public cloud providers are making strides in their market debut. A major differentiator among these providers are the unique services available on each of the platforms.
This services-level competition is a big reason why many IT advisory firms promote a multi-cloud approach. As the big 3 and other cloud providers compete on feature set – you don’t need to fall in to the trap of choosing a single cloud provider. You can deploy a variety of workloads to different public clouds to take advantage of their unique services.
AWS for Everyone is lateral thinking at its best.
AWS, however, could be thinking laterally as they target users less technical than the typical enterprise IT team. The name of the skunkworks project suggests just this – “AWS for Everyone”. If a major cloud provider could lead the way with a balanced abstraction layer for software-savvy folks who don’t know how to code, then switching costs to other clouds could be incredibly high.
Vendors of low code platforms have been chasing significant partnerships with major cloud vendors for a long time. Mendix makes strong plays in the AWS marketplace, K2 has dominated the Microsoft marketplace. Microsoft introduced Flow and other updates to their toolset for folks who don’t code, and every cloud vendor has case studies of no code and low code success stories on their websites.
It is not clear how far the secret “AWS for Everyone” initiative might take the non-developer. But it is exciting to see a proprietary attempt from one of the largest cloud vendors in the world.
June 26th Update: Turns out we were right: AWS Launches No Code Platform – Honeycode
