AWS Infrastructure Composer Newsince 2022
A service for visually designing serverless application architectures and auto-generating IaC templates
What It Does
AWS Infrastructure Composer is the renamed successor of AWS Application Composer. AWS Infrastructure Composer is a service that lets you visually design serverless application architectures using drag-and-drop and automatically generates corresponding SAM (Serverless Application Model) templates. Simply place and connect resources like Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, and S3 on a canvas to produce a deployable IaC template. It's also available as a VS Code extension.
Use Cases
Infrastructure Composer is used for designing and prototyping serverless applications, visualizing and understanding existing CloudFormation/SAM templates, explaining architectures to team members, and as a learning tool for IaC templates. Even developers unfamiliar with YAML can design infrastructure visually.
Everyday Analogy
Think of it like a floor plan design tool. When building a house (application), drawing blueprints (IaC templates) by hand is tedious. With a floor plan tool (Infrastructure Composer), you just drag and drop rooms (Lambda, DynamoDB, etc.) and draw doors and hallways (connections), and accurate blueprints are automatically generated.
What Is Infrastructure Composer?
AWS Infrastructure Composer is a tool for visually designing serverless application architectures. Normally, building AWS infrastructure requires hand-writing CloudFormation or SAM YAML templates. With Infrastructure Composer, you simply place and connect resources on a GUI, and correct YAML templates are automatically generated.
Visual Design
On the Infrastructure Composer canvas, you can drag and drop AWS resources including Lambda functions, API Gateway, DynamoDB tables, S3 buckets, SQS queues, and SNS topics. When you connect resources with lines, the necessary IAM permissions and environment variables are automatically configured. For example, connecting API Gateway to Lambda automatically reflects the API route and Lambda integration in the template.
Bidirectional Sync with Templates
A key feature of Infrastructure Composer is bidirectional synchronization between the visual design and YAML template. Adding a resource on the canvas is reflected in the YAML, and editing the YAML directly is reflected on the canvas. You can also import existing SAM/CloudFormation templates to visualize them, which is helpful for understanding complex templates.
Getting Started
Open Infrastructure Composer in the AWS console, or install the AWS Toolkit extension in VS Code. Create a new project or drag and drop an existing SAM template to import it. Place and connect resources on the canvas, then deploy the generated template with the sam deploy command. The VS Code version syncs with local files in real time.
Things to Watch Out For
- Infrastructure Composer itself is free - you only pay for resources deployed using the generated templates
- Rich visual design on the canvas centers on serverless-related resources, so check in advance that the resource types you want to work with are supported
- Generated templates are in SAM format, so SAM CLI installation is required for deployment
References (Official AWS Resources)
The primary sources for this page are the official AWS website and documentation. Check the official pages below for the latest specifications and pricing.
If this page and the official documentation disagree, treat the official documentation as authoritative.
