5 ms·

Amazon Honeycode Shutting Down

71 points by navels 3y ago

endisneigh 3y ago
It’s really impressive how ubiquitous discourse seems to be as forum software. It’s interesting that this was posted there instead of as a blog post, but I guess it was in beta.
navels 3y ago
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 3y ago
  That's cool end date!
appleflaxen 3y ago
Damn. Never heard of it but it looks cool!
spullara 3y ago
I got this email too and I don't even remember signing up for it or what it was.
charles_f 3y ago
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.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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
      - lolinder 3y ago
        Isn't what you're proposing an entirely new product? How could an engineer put that together in two weeks?
        bdcravens 3y ago
        No, just a wrapper really. As you said, most of the heavy lifting is done by the AWS services. It needn't be high quality at all; just something that someone could download to not lose all of their work. Of course I meant "two weeks" as something more or less metaphorical - could be 16 weeks, and a 2-pizza team, given the amount of time until Honeycode shuts down. I just think Amazon has the resources to do that. If I was a competitor like Retool I'd be building a migration tool right now.
- justrealist 3y ago
ArchOversight 3y ago
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.
chickenpotpie 3y ago
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
bdcravens 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Same with all the human obituaries.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    People don't always have the incentive to market themselves, but startups/products do.
NomDePlum 3y ago
Anyone else detecting a touch of irony in a nocode product becoming a nocode deployment?
pylua 3y ago
Looks just as complicated as programming.
- munk-a 3y ago
  For a no-code solution to reduce the complexity of the programming environment it's built on top of it needs to reduce the functionality of that environment (outside of free-wins, which we've mostly already eliminated in modern languages). In beta phases no-code always looks extremely attractive because you can fudge it and get a fair portion of the functionality with only some of the complexity - but as you start to emulate more and more your "no-code" language just turns into "code".
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    That is why the sweet spot is internal company apps. They can be less polished and just need to be useful enough but not SaaS level generic.
seper8 3y ago
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...
nell 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
    - monknomo 3y ago
      Yeah, I had similar experience with https://eclipse.dev/windowbuilder/ https://eclipse.dev/windowbuilder/ in java swing. You can use the drag and drop for most of it, and if you need to hand edit some code, it mostly works and is reflected in the gui tool. I thought it was pretty productive and honestly sort of miss that kind of development
    - SCUSKU 3y ago
      Definitely agree with you in terms of limiting functionality built on top of WYSIWYG UIs. 2 years ago I developed a non-trivial app using Retool and it became an unmaintainable spaghetti monster "code" base. (Side note: Retool was pretty solid, my application was just way too complex for it) The result was I wasted 6 weeks of time when I should've just spent 2-3 days prototyping and then throw out the tool once I had a good idea of what we actually wanted. In the end if didn't matter since the project died anyways :/
delocalized 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- tspike 3y ago
  Seems to me that the demand would still be there, it’s just that AI would replace/augment whatever rules engine is mapping the UI into running code.
scarface_74 3y ago
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.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  We’re you in marketing?
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    No, I was in the consulting department doing hands on keyboard work. I specialized in “application modernization”. It’s a combination of cloud architecture and enterprise development/architecture[1]. We were sone of the closest to the customers. Getting customer adoption for new service is always big deal. You can see when a new service or feature is introduced where part of the marketing is showing what customers are actually using it. [1] No I’m not looking for a job and this isn’t self promotion. I have more than enough work.
shrubble 3y ago
Certainly gives another meaning to the word 'no-code'!
ignoramous 3y ago
FAQ here: https://archive.is/KBpyh https://archive.is/KBpyh / https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-ending-soon-faq/28346 https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-ending-soon-faq/2... Shutting down on Feb 29, 2024
honeycode_eng 3y ago
Haha. I was an engineer on Honeycode in 2017. I initially joined the project because the best talent was flocking to finally make a frontend builder for developers. When I was there, the vision was there (allow people to build apps with spreadsheet skills), but the execution was all over the map: we had engineers mostly interested in getting promoted, so it was super political. I remember that every team had their own redux store (including one for the navbar, one for the login screen, one for the home screen, etc.). It was totally dysfunctional, but a lot of people got promoted. All while we didn’t have a single customer! Today, I’m pretty skeptical about no-code. It just feels like the citizen developer is a dead-end. I think Honeycode was in this uncanny valley where you can’t really use it for real applications. Honeycode didn’t have source control, custom React components, nor testing). Now, at my current company, we use Retool (https://retool.com https://retool.com). It comes with source control (not perfect, the diffs can be overly complex at times), custom React components (so I can import whatever libraries I want), and good developer ergonomics. Retool isn’t as powerful as code, but it really scratches the itch of “I just need a CRUD front-end, and don’t want to learn redux” really well. We’ve probably built 30 - 50 apps with it at my current company. I think that, combined with AI, might be the future of programming.
- joejohnston 3y ago
  I get your concerns with no-code, but would you not agree that an Open Source alternative - with long-term viability - is a better investment.
- navels 3y ago
  > It was totally dysfunctional, but a lot of people got promoted. All while we didn’t have a single customer! At Amazon, really? :-)
pabs3 3y ago
The announcement for this is actually here: https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-ending-soon-community-discussion/28317 https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-ending-soon-commu...
whoknowswhat11 3y ago
I was a user of this. But didn’t find it that useful! So if others had my experience traction would have been super low. Like a lot of AWS stuff but not this.

71 points by navels 3y ago

It’s really impressive how ubiquitous discourse seems to be as forum software. It’s interesting that this was posted there instead of as a blog post, but I guess it was in beta.

navels 3y ago

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 3y ago
That's cool end date!

appleflaxen 3y ago

Damn. Never heard of it but it looks cool!

spullara 3y ago

I got this email too and I don't even remember signing up for it or what it was.

charles_f 3y ago

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.

bdcravens 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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
    - lolinder 3y ago
      Isn't what you're proposing an entirely new product? How could an engineer put that together in two weeks?
      - bdcravens 3y ago
        No, just a wrapper really. As you said, most of the heavy lifting is done by the AWS services. It needn't be high quality at all; just something that someone could download to not lose all of their work. Of course I meant "two weeks" as something more or less metaphorical - could be 16 weeks, and a 2-pizza team, given the amount of time until Honeycode shuts down. I just think Amazon has the resources to do that. If I was a competitor like Retool I'd be building a migration tool right now.
justrealist 3y ago

ArchOversight 3y ago

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.

chickenpotpie 3y ago

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

bdcravens 3y ago

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 3y ago
Same with all the human obituaries.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  People don't always have the incentive to market themselves, but startups/products do.

NomDePlum 3y ago

Anyone else detecting a touch of irony in a nocode product becoming a nocode deployment?

pylua 3y ago

Looks just as complicated as programming.

munk-a 3y ago
For a no-code solution to reduce the complexity of the programming environment it's built on top of it needs to reduce the functionality of that environment (outside of free-wins, which we've mostly already eliminated in modern languages). In beta phases no-code always looks extremely attractive because you can fudge it and get a fair portion of the functionality with only some of the complexity - but as you start to emulate more and more your "no-code" language just turns into "code".
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  That is why the sweet spot is internal company apps. They can be less polished and just need to be useful enough but not SaaS level generic.

seper8 3y ago

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...

nell 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
  - monknomo 3y ago
    Yeah, I had similar experience with https://eclipse.dev/windowbuilder/ https://eclipse.dev/windowbuilder/ in java swing. You can use the drag and drop for most of it, and if you need to hand edit some code, it mostly works and is reflected in the gui tool. I thought it was pretty productive and honestly sort of miss that kind of development
  - SCUSKU 3y ago
    Definitely agree with you in terms of limiting functionality built on top of WYSIWYG UIs. 2 years ago I developed a non-trivial app using Retool and it became an unmaintainable spaghetti monster "code" base. (Side note: Retool was pretty solid, my application was just way too complex for it) The result was I wasted 6 weeks of time when I should've just spent 2-3 days prototyping and then throw out the tool once I had a good idea of what we actually wanted. In the end if didn't matter since the project died anyways :/

delocalized 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tspike 3y ago
Seems to me that the demand would still be there, it’s just that AI would replace/augment whatever rules engine is mapping the UI into running code.

scarface_74 3y ago

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.

moneywoes 3y ago
We’re you in marketing?
- scarface_74 3y ago
  No, I was in the consulting department doing hands on keyboard work. I specialized in “application modernization”. It’s a combination of cloud architecture and enterprise development/architecture[1]. We were sone of the closest to the customers. Getting customer adoption for new service is always big deal. You can see when a new service or feature is introduced where part of the marketing is showing what customers are actually using it. [1] No I’m not looking for a job and this isn’t self promotion. I have more than enough work.

shrubble 3y ago

Certainly gives another meaning to the word 'no-code'!

ignoramous 3y ago

FAQ here: https://archive.is/KBpyh https://archive.is/KBpyh / https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-ending-soon-faq/28346 https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-ending-soon-faq/2... Shutting down on Feb 29, 2024

honeycode_eng 3y ago

Haha. I was an engineer on Honeycode in 2017. I initially joined the project because the best talent was flocking to finally make a frontend builder for developers. When I was there, the vision was there (allow people to build apps with spreadsheet skills), but the execution was all over the map: we had engineers mostly interested in getting promoted, so it was super political. I remember that every team had their own redux store (including one for the navbar, one for the login screen, one for the home screen, etc.). It was totally dysfunctional, but a lot of people got promoted. All while we didn’t have a single customer! Today, I’m pretty skeptical about no-code. It just feels like the citizen developer is a dead-end. I think Honeycode was in this uncanny valley where you can’t really use it for real applications. Honeycode didn’t have source control, custom React components, nor testing). Now, at my current company, we use Retool (https://retool.com https://retool.com). It comes with source control (not perfect, the diffs can be overly complex at times), custom React components (so I can import whatever libraries I want), and good developer ergonomics. Retool isn’t as powerful as code, but it really scratches the itch of “I just need a CRUD front-end, and don’t want to learn redux” really well. We’ve probably built 30 - 50 apps with it at my current company. I think that, combined with AI, might be the future of programming.

joejohnston 3y ago
I get your concerns with no-code, but would you not agree that an Open Source alternative - with long-term viability - is a better investment.
navels 3y ago
> It was totally dysfunctional, but a lot of people got promoted. All while we didn’t have a single customer! At Amazon, really? :-)

pabs3 3y ago

The announcement for this is actually here: https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-ending-soon-community-discussion/28317 https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-ending-soon-commu...

whoknowswhat11 3y ago

I was a user of this. But didn’t find it that useful! So if others had my experience traction would have been super low. Like a lot of AWS stuff but not this.