Low-code application platform (LCAP) provider Mendix deepened its relationship with hyperscaler Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support composable enterprise strategies and accelerate the pace of “innovating and adapting to change, as the pace of change itself is accelerating,” Maarten de Vries, who manages the AWS program at Mendix, told SDxCentral.

Mendix, which has been cloud-native on AWS since 2016, introduced a new portfolio of AWS connectors and a reference deployment service that reduces the setup time of the vendor's LCAP in customer Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) environments from a 40-hour work week to a quick lunch break.

Mendix CEO Tim Srock claimed the vendor's “customers and partners are eager to adopt a composable enterprise strategy,” rendering this joint cloud and low-code work “a natural fit,” de Vries added. “Mendix is all about how you develop applications – with speed, collaboration, and control – but the partnership with AWS also ensures that what you build with Mendix is optimized for AWS' cloud infrastructure in terms of flexibility, cost, reliability, scalability, performance, and security,” he explained.

The partnership also adds artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities from AWS that Mendix itself doesn't focus on. “This combination of the how and the what makes it easy for customers to build [modular] packaged business capabilities that can be used, re-used and, in the case of independent software vendors, monetized via the AWS and Mendix marketplaces,” de Vries said.

He also highlighted the LCAP provider's digital execution practice, which “helps organizations with the change management required for the composable thinking and IT democratization” of a transition from monolithic applications to modular apps, and from traditional dev teams to fusion teams made of dev experts and citizen developers. “After all, the composable enterprise is as much about people and processes as it is about technology,” de Vries said.

The most challenging part of integrating applications into AWS is authentication. While that feat was achievable without Mendix's new connector, “you had to figure it out for yourself, and that requires knowledge that not every developer has,” de Vries said.

The authentication connector packages that specialized knowledge and allows teams to authenticate themselves in two ways. For a simpler option they can use static credentials, or opt for more complex dynamic session credentials. The latter tends to be more secure, however, and is recommended for production applications.

“In the true spirit of reusability, which is a key principle of low-code, we've used the AWS Authentication Connector ourselves to build connectors for several popular AWS services, but developers can also use the AWS Authentication Connector to build their own bespoke integrations with other AWS services,” de Vries noted.

Mendix also introduced a reference deployment for Mendix apps on Amazon EKS. The automation script is built with Terraform and automatically sets up and provisions all 95 AWS and Amazon EKS services required before deploying Mendix apps to an AWS environment.

De Vries noted this process used to be done manually with a consultant and could take 40 hours to finish, “but now it's completely automated and runs in 30 minutes or less,” he touted. And that time period should be fairly consistent because the service “only sets up the Mendix runtime environment where you can then deploy your Mendix apps.”

While this version of the reference deployment doesn't have specific enterprise capabilities like high availability or autoscaling, those can be added by customers. “We are looking to add more capabilities based on customer adoption and feedback on the initial release,” de Vries added.