[HN Gopher] Amazon Honeycode Shutting Down
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Amazon Honeycode Shutting Down
Author : navels
Score : 35 points
Date : 2023-08-24 20:34 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (honeycodecommunity.aws)
(TXT) w3m dump (honeycodecommunity.aws)
| charles_f wrote:
| Another downside to all these no-/low-code tools. You're
| dependent on the provider to maintain their service, and if they
| inevitably stop after a few years, you're on your own.
| justrealist wrote:
| I suspect literally nobody used this tool.
| dannyphantom wrote:
| Back in undergrad around ~2016, a professor who shared the same
| sentiment once said something funny along the lines of 'No/low-
| code is temporary. But one thing is certain - HTML will never
| die!' during a class discussion around the concept of 'clicks,
| not code' and if it presented a real risk to future job
| security.
|
| Services like this are cool and all - if one of them gets
| someone to play around with it and find they like it, that's a
| solid win. But relying on a 3rd parties usually leads to some
| sort of heartbreak down the line if and when it disappears and
| your projects along with it.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Surely AWS could commit a developer to spend a week or two
| writing a basic wrapper, even if it's a MVP-ish set of node or
| python scripts that lets folks download their apps. Or for a
| more AWS-specific solution, export them to EC2 instances.
| lolinder wrote:
| Where do you arrive at a week or two as an estimate for
| taking a cloud platform and making it self-hostable, even as
| an MVP? I know nothing about Honeycode, but I would bet that
| it's piecing together a bunch of AWS services behind the
| scenes rather than being something you can just stick on an
| EC2 instance.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Wouldn't even need to be the same application, just
| something that lets the existing data form a functional
| application. Could even plug into Amplify, Step Functions,
| etc
| stevage wrote:
| I'm kind of shocked that Glitch is still around after all these
| years.
| ArchOversight wrote:
| What is Amazon Honeycode:
|
| > Amazon Honeycode is a fully managed service that allows you to
| quickly build mobile and web apps for teams--without programming.
| Build Amazon Honeycode apps for managing almost anything, like
| projects, customers, operations, approvals, resources, and even
| your team.
| navels wrote:
| Banner from the linked forum:
|
| To our valued customers: After careful consideration, we have
| made the decision to end the Amazon Honeycode beta service,
| effective February 29, 2024. New customer sign-ups and account
| plan upgrades are no longer available. Existing customers will be
| able to use Honeycode and your Honeycode apps as normal (and add
| team members to your existing account) until February 29, 2024,
| when the service will be discontinued. After this date, you will
| no longer be able to use Honeycode or any of the apps you created
| in Honeycode. To learn more about this change, and how to
| download your data, visit the Community Discussions.
| stevage wrote:
| That's cool end date!
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| They need to make this warning more prominent throughout their
| website. The main site, honeycode.aws, doesn't mention this at
| all until the user tries to create an account. Someone can easily
| waste a few hours reading their documentation and marketing
| materials before learning the product is deprecated
| shrubble wrote:
| Certainly gives another meaning to the word 'no-code'!
| bdcravens wrote:
| I should really keep a running list of apps I hear about for the
| first time (or don't remember hearing about) when the shutdown
| announcement shows up on HN.
| stevage wrote:
| Same with all the human obituaries.
| seper8 wrote:
| More and more I (ex MAGMA Cloud engineer) become disillusioned
| with their garbage propietary services.
|
| The services I've recommended to clients are too often low
| quality, overcomplicated, expensive, shit alternatives to the
| better open source solutions...
|
| And to add insult to injury, imagine having built something with
| a service like this and it being deprecated in such a short
| timeline...
| ignoramous wrote:
| FAQ here: https://archive.is/KBpyh /
| https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-ending-soon-faq/2...
|
| Shutting down on Feb 29, 2024
| nell wrote:
| I will be happy to use a no-code platforms that lets me eject out
| into a standard application. Otherwise, I'm just learning and
| depending on a proprietary system.
|
| Once you need something slightly complex, no-code becomes non-
| trivial. It requires serious commitment to learn all the
| techniques the designers came up with.
|
| So most people who use these tools use them for for simple or
| short-lived apps and side projects, which they could now use web
| frameworks, but just want to try something new, because they know
| it's trivial.
| duxup wrote:
| Do any allow ejecting?
|
| I would assume exposing their spaghetti that comes with such a
| platform is a big concern.
|
| Let alone managing bringing things back in after someone gets
| creative.
| bcoates wrote:
| I've used WYSIWYG UI dialog editors (mostly the one MSVS used
| to bundle with C# in... I wanna say 2012?) that maintain
| their entire state as somewhat-editible two-way code (so if I
| modified the code, at least within a constrained envelope, it
| would be reflected in the editor and remain WYSIWYG
| editable).
|
| Does that count?
|
| If so, I think the lesson is you need to keep the no-code
| side way, way less ambitious than is theoretically possible
| in order to keep everyone sane and you might actually have a
| useful tool that doesn't dig you into a big hole.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If your workflows are exposed to their UI using an API, you
| can get your workflows out.
|
| Whether it's worth it vs rebuilding them bespoke is a
| different question. Or you have to have an ETL layer between
| your SaaS vendor and whatever open source workflow runner
| you'd eject to.
| delocalized wrote:
| I wonder how long no-code is going to stay relevant in the age of
| AI. It feels like the segment of "what a novice with no-code can
| do that a novice with an appropriate AI tool can't" is ever-
| shrinking and the tail of "what specialized use cases AI can
| cover that no-code can't" continues to grow.
| clncy wrote:
| No-code platforms are really DSLs wrapped in a nice UI. No-code
| platforms that are more open and developer focused typically
| let you actually dump out the app as a big bundle of config/DSL
| (e.g. a custom JSON format).
|
| Maybe using LLMs to generate DSL code will produce better (and
| more maintainable) results than fully-fledged languages?
| bcoates wrote:
| Yep. All the no-code systems I've ever investigated are
| essentially expert systems, and if there's one constant over
| the history of AI boom and bust cycles, it's "statistical
| models absolutely demolish expert systems every time".
| djangelic wrote:
| I use n8n for managing ChatGPT's API and to connect it to other
| APIs like gmail. It helps abstract away the authentication side
| of APIs which can be very cumbersome to manage.
|
| It also helped me better understand the chatgpt API. N8n allows
| you to code in raw javascript or python which has allowed me to
| branch out to pure python.
|
| I would say that no-code low code has a place as a stepping
| stone, that can allow other invested parties besides developers
| to manage inter departmental flow and build a blueprint that
| can be redone with actual engineers in the preferred manner.
| NomDePlum wrote:
| Anyone else detecting a touch of irony in a nocode product
| becoming a nocode deployment?
| pylua wrote:
| Looks just as complicated as programming.
| appleflaxen wrote:
| Damn. Never heard of it but it looks cool!
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Until 2 weeks ago. I worked at AWS Professional Services.
|
| Most of the time, when a new service is introduced, we were given
| all sorts of go to market videos to watch and were asked to find
| use cases for it for our customers.
|
| I never heard anything about Honeycomb coming from anyone on the
| service team. I worked on a popular company sponsored open source
| project. We looked into integrating with it and I said hell no.
| spullara wrote:
| I got this email too and I don't even remember signing up for it
| or what it was.
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(page generated 2023-08-24 23:00 UTC)