AWS App Studio FAQs

General

AWS App Studio is a generative AI-powered service that uses natural language to build enterprise-grade applications, empowering a new set of builders to create applications in minutes. With App Studio, technical professionals without deep software development skills like IT Project Managers, Data Engineers, Enterprise Architects, and Solution Architects, can quickly develop business applications tailored to their organization's needs

App Studio helps you create business applications for a wide range of activities, such as inventory management, multi-step approval processes, claims management, inspection and audits, and metrics and reporting. These apps contain user interfaces (UIs), custom business logic, and application-specific data models to improve the productivity of employees.

At the company or organizational level, yes, an AWS account is required to enable App Studio. If App Studio has been set up by your team or organization, an individual App Studio user doesn’t need an AWS account to build applications

From the AWS Console access, you can enable App Studio and then invite other employees to build applications. You can optionally configure connections to existing AWS data sources or third-party services to use in applications.

Once App Studio is enabled, you can log into your company’s instance of App Studio using your standard corporate credentials. Since your company has enabled App Studio through the Console, you won't need user-level Console access, and you can immediately begin creating applications.

 

If you can understand relational data and simple JavaScript-based expressions, you can build secure business applications on AWS using App Studio.

Today, App Studio is available in the following AWS Regions: US West (Oregon) Region and Europe (Ireland), with more Regions available in the future. App Studio supports cross-Region calls to connect with data in other Regions.

To engage with App Studio’s community, you can request to join the AWS Developers Slack workspace here and post in the #aws-app-studio channel. Users will need an AWS Builder ID to request access.

How it works

App Studio uses generative AI throughout the product to make it faster and easier to build an application. For example, App Studio provides a generative AI powered conversational assistant to accelerate building new apps and modifying existing ones. Simply describe the application you want to build, such as, “Build an app to review and approve invoices,” and App Studio will generate the new application, including a user interface for listing and approving invoices, a data model for the approval records, and business logic for routing approval records and notifying owners.

To modify an application, you can describe your desired change in natural language, and then App Studio will propose the suggested changes. After confirming, App Studio’s assistant will automatically update your application. Additionally, embedded buttons within App Studio’s building experience make it easier to build and test by converting natural language to JavaScript-based business logic, generating sample data, enriching data models, and generating sample service configurations.

Throughout the building journey, you can ask questions such as, “how do I hide the table component?” and App Studio will provide a contextual answer based on the product documentation and your application.

App Studio may transfer data across Regions to enable these generative AI features. You can opt out of cross-Region data movement after onboarding. For more information, consult the AWS App Studio documentation.

App Studio offers built-in components to add generative AI capabilities (like information summarization, content generation, and data analysis) to your apps. Simply describe what you need to the assistant, or drag and drop the component onto your app’s page. Once added, it’s easy to adjust the natural language prompt and configuration settings to customize the output from the large language model (LLM).

Yes, you can invite other users to help you build and edit an application in AWS App Studio, but apps are private by default. You can also share co-owner permission allowing the other user(s) to publish and share the application.

App Studio offers connectors to 200+ AWS services including Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, and AWS Lambda. You can also connect to hundreds of third-party services like Salesforce, Twilio, Zendesk, and Slack using the API and OpenAPI connectors.

Yes. App Studio allows you to add a custom logo and banner image, supports styling with your company’s brand colors, and even allows toggling between light and dark modes for published apps.

No. The ability to select customize domains for published app is not yet available.

Yes. When using AWS Organizations, you can enable App Studio in each of the child AWS accounts. For example, applications built by the HR department can reside in a different App Studio instance from the apps built by the Sales department if they use separate accounts

Security

When connecting to AWS services, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles allow an Admin to define granular permissions for all applications that depend on the specified connector. Users of the published application will only be able to access and modify data specified by the IAM policy. When connecting to third-party systems with OAuth-based flows, end users will have their same data access as they have in the third-party system.

App Studio publishes applications to our fully managed hosting environment. The applications operate as standalone web applications with unique URLs, and we handle the operations, maintenance, and scaling for the underlying cloud services. Applications connect to data within your AWS account(s) without needing to modify your VPC configuration.

After an application is published, the builder can share it with user groups within their organization. If the builder configured custom application roles (like Requestors and Approvers), they can specify the role when sharing the application.