My experience with using AWS Application Composer in Visual Studio Code
Tags: devtools, devops, aws, awsapplicationcomposer
Published: 2024-02-01 21:02:01

We all love shopping. And what if we could buy everything we need in one place? The same concept applies to our development tools. At the 2022 AWS re:Invent, AWS announced an amazing tool called AWS Application Composer. With this tool, you can build your serverless application on a visual canvas. Later on, AWS expanded its support to cover not only serverless applications, but also over 1000+ CloudFormation resources.

During the 2023 AWS re:Invent, AWS announced the support of AWS Application Composer in AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code . I find this very exciting because it allows developers to use the AWS Application Composer, as well as Amazon Q, CodeWhisperer, CodeCatalyst all in one place in the Visual Studio Code editor. This will make infrastructure-as-code (IaC) development quicker and reduce the need for context switching.

This post is mainly about to show the experience of AWS Application Composer in Visual Studio Code. 

#### Prerequisites

* Visual Studio Code
 * https://code.visualstudio.com/
* AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code
 * download from here https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=AmazonWebServices.aws-toolkit-vscode

#### This is the updated AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code


![AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/o5he3oau10g0d3eqrynu.png)

#### AWS Application Composer in Visual Studio CODE

* It's really simple, just create a blank yaml file eg: `template.yaml`
* Right click on the file and click `Open with Application Composer`
* If you are using a big screen you can experience the best out of it 

To make things easier to show, I made a little video. 

{% embed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbuvKm6HcGc %}

I basically used AWS Application Composer in Visual Studio Code to create a lambda function and lambda layer, which generated my IaC. How awesome is that?

The following video demonstrates how to use the AWS Step Functions Workflow Studio using AWS Application Composer in Visual Studio Code.

{% embed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jJUylCqiZ4 %}

#### AWS Application Composer Support 1000+ CloudFormation resources

I launched a CloudFormation Stack for an EKS Cluster with all the dependencies, like as a VPC, NAT Gateway, SUBNETS, and so on, because I was curious to try this out in Visual Studio Code. It was beautifully visualized using AWS Application Composer. 


![AWS Application Composer Support 1000+ CloudFormation resources](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/qhjgnpdp5mqhfzlw1ujc.png)

#### Conclusion

I want to stay away from context switching as a developer. Amazon Q, CodeWhisperer, CodeCatalyst, and Application Composer are now  all available in one location. This will help with the development of code for me and other developers. 

In my next article, I'll go into detail on how to use AWS SAM to deploy your infrastructure.

Me and @zachjonesnoel will be doing deep dive soon in our of the [The Zacs' Show Talking AWS Shows] (https://www.youtube.com/@thezacsshowtalkingaws/streams)