Best Application Development Software for AWS Step Functions

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service. Customers such as Duolingo, Samsung, GE, and Cook Pad use ECS to run their most sensitive and mission-critical applications because of its security, reliability, and scalability. ECS is a great choice to run containers for several reasons. First, you can choose to run your ECS clusters using AWS Fargate, which is serverless compute for containers. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design. Second, ECS is used extensively within Amazon to power services such as Amazon SageMaker, AWS Batch, Amazon Lex, and Amazon.com’s recommendation engine, ensuring ECS is tested extensively for security, reliability, and availability.

AWS Cloud9 is a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you write, run, and debug your code with just a browser. It includes a code editor, debugger, and terminal. Cloud9 comes prepackaged with essential tools for popular programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, PHP, and more, so you don’t need to install files or configure your development machine to start new projects. Since your Cloud9 IDE is cloud-based, you can work on your projects from your office, home, or anywhere using an internet-connected machine. Cloud9 also provides a seamless experience for developing serverless applications enabling you to easily define resources, debug, and switch between local and remote execution of serverless applications. With Cloud9, you can quickly share your development environment with your team, enabling you to pair program and track each other's inputs in real time.

There are billions of devices in homes, factories, oil wells, hospitals, cars, and thousands of other places. With the proliferation of devices, you increasingly need solutions to connect them, and collect, store, and analyze device data. AWS has broad and deep IoT services, from the edge to the cloud. AWS IoT is the only cloud vendor to bring together data management and rich analytics in easy-to-use services designed for noisy IoT data. AWS IoT offers services for all layers of security, including preventive security mechanisms, like encryption and access control to device data, and service to continuously monitor and audit configurations. AWS brings AI and IoT together to make devices more intelligent. You can create models in the cloud and deploy them to devices where they run 2x faster compared to other offerings. Optimize operations by easily creating digital twins of real-world systems. Run analytics on volumes of IoT data easily—without building an analytics platform.

AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to facilitate communication between your services across various types of computing infrastructure. App Mesh offers comprehensive visibility and high availability for your applications. Modern applications are generally made up of multiple services. Each service can be developed using various types of compute infrastructure, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Fargate. As the number of services within an application grows, it becomes difficult to pinpoint the exact location of errors, redirect traffic after errors, and safely implement code changes. Previously, this required creating monitoring and control logic directly in your code and redeploying your services every time there were changes.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SQS eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message oriented middleware, and empowers developers to focus on differentiating work. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available. Get started with SQS in minutes using the AWS console, Command Line Interface or SDK of your choice, and three simple commands. Use Amazon SQS to transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available. SQS lets you decouple application components so that they run and fail independently, increasing the overall fault tolerance of the system.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a fully managed messaging service for both system-to-system and app-to-person (A2P) communication. It enables you to communicate between systems through publish/subscribe (pub/sub) patterns that enable messaging between decoupled microservice applications or to communicate directly to users via SMS, mobile push and email. The system-to-system pub/sub functionality provides topics for high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging. Using Amazon SNS topics, your publisher systems can fanout messages to a large number of subscriber systems or customer endpoints including Amazon SQS queues, AWS Lambda functions and HTTP/S, for parallel processing. The A2P messaging functionality enables you to send messages to users at scale using either a pub/sub pattern or direct-publish messages using a single API.

Visually compose modern applications from 1,000+ AWS resources with little guesswork. Rapidly generate ready-to-deploy infrastructure as code for enhanced resources. Write code or build it visually, and use the best development experience for the task at hand. Streamline the composition of modern applications from multiple AWS services. Use the right tool for the task, including visual, code, or generative AI-powered code suggestions in your IDE. Quickly understand your application architecture and keep it current as you collaborate with your team. Integrate with Workflow Studio to visually orchestrate over 220 AWS services or public HTTP endpoints with Step Functions workflows. Begin to diagram a model of your application, start a new architecture from scratch, import an existing IaC template, or select from common patterns. Extend visual composing to Visual Studio Code and create generative AI-powered code suggestions for any AWS CloudFormation resource.

AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Fargate makes it easy for you to focus on building your applications. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design. Fargate allocates the right amount of compute, eliminating the need to choose instances and scale cluster capacity. You only pay for the resources required to run your containers, so there is no over-provisioning and paying for additional servers. Fargate runs each task or pod in its own kernel providing the tasks and pods their own isolated compute environment. This enables your application to have workload isolation and improved security by design.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service. Customers such as Intel, Snap, Intuit, GoDaddy, and Autodesk trust EKS to run their most sensitive and mission-critical applications because of its security, reliability, and scalability. EKS is the best place to run Kubernetes for several reasons. First, you can choose to run your EKS clusters using AWS Fargate, which is serverless compute for containers. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design. Second, EKS is deeply integrated with services such as Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling Groups, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), providing you a seamless experience to monitor, scale, and load-balance your applications.

Run code without thinking about servers. Pay only for the compute time you consume. AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. Just upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from other AWS services or call it directly from any web or mobile app. AWS Lambda automatically runs your code without requiring you to provision or manage servers. Just write the code and upload it to Lambda. AWS Lambda automatically scales your application by running code in response to each trigger. Your code runs in parallel and processes each trigger individually, scaling precisely with the size of the workload.

Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that makes it easy to connect applications together using data from your own applications, integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services. EventBridge delivers a stream of real-time data from event sources, such as Zendesk, Datadog, or Pagerduty, and routes that data to targets like AWS Lambda. You can set up routing rules to determine where to send your data to build application architectures that react in real time to all of your data sources. EventBridge makes it easy to build event-driven applications because it takes care of event ingestion and delivery, security, authorization, and error handling for you. As your applications become more interconnected through events, you need to spend more effort to find events and understand their structure in order to write code to react to those events.