Example from us using Azure Data Factory: You can add a step to call out to an API, which we did for a data flow that had a lot of calls. Performance was atrocious. Dug into it, and the API getting called was replying in 100ms or so, but ADF's "escape hatch" was adding 5-10 seconds of overhead to send the POST and parse the HTTP status code.
Microsoft Support said that's normal, expected behavior for the service.
In the end, we had to write an additional batching layer ourselves.
The success of low code implementations often comes with a curse of investing man-years of development effort to build increasingly complex applications in proprietary low code languages executable in a closed ecosystem (and commercial terms) of a specific vendor.
I believe there is a place for enterprise app platforms which are a) open source, b) not based on proprietary languages, c) with low code capabilities, fueled with AI code generation, d) runnable anywhere without staying dependent on typically user-based commercial model.
Shameless plus: we are working on such a thing, and competing with traditional low code platforms is not easy, I could tell a few stories about what we have tried, what works and what not really, if you are interested. I would be also extremely thankful for any comments and hints you may have, see https://openkoda.com
That's the definition of vendor lock-in. Once the vendor has it's hooks in your organization, good luck removing it. Sometimes it's just the cost of doing business, but the more the hooks, the greater the chance that a vendor triples or quintuples the cost of their product that affects your organization's secret sauce.
I feel like the goal of low-code solutions is to get you over the barrel. Much in the same way AWS tries to get into your company's operating costs.
I create nocode plugins on a specific proprietary stalled platform, for a living, for a few years now, so I am definitely aware of the pitfalls in the area.
For me the problem is that the API to it got created in a nice format but then got abandoned, if they just listened over the years and added the changes we third party devs needed it would have been great.
All the components and modules that low code tools provide should be nothing more than an onboarding tutorial like the first few levels of Factorio, before letting the engineering team loose hand in hand with the users. It shouldn’t be an escape hatch, it should be the front door.
As such all these low code tools make the mistake of making it really difficult to bring the engineering team into the fold: modularization, logging, debugging, version control, and development tools are absolute garbage so instead of engineering providing a few sane company specific building blocks that they can tend and nurture, it inevitably turns into a shitshow because you can’t use a tool that ultimately depends on the IT department to fix the IT department!
The best “low-code” tools have already been around for over a decade: it’s the headless CMS and autogenerated admin pages ala Django and Wagtail. They’ve been focused on solving the content management problem for e-commerce and marketing, but IMO it’s the write path for other groups too. The engineers write the pages and blocks and components while defining an input/configuration schema for an automated tool that is usable by laymen. Up the level of abstraction to a well curated (by the engineers at the customer level) IFTTT layer and bam, you’ve 95% of use of low code without the 5% that inevitably ruins it.
Per end user rather than per developer means they're far too expensive to introduce as a general IT toolbox item, they need to be part of a major strategic project where the $5-30/month per staff user has a hope of being justified.
But that also often takes it outside the "IT Dept", which is often just "infrastructure and pc fleet" support, not development ( at least, that's my experience ). IT might do internal scripting and some service interface tooling, but business tooling and software is rarer, that's usually either dev teams or ERP teams. The ERP teams will already using ERP platform tooling, so that further narrows the market.
I don't have a good solution for this, but it's always been the hurdle I've tripped on working for medium size enterprises.
There would seem to be an opportunity for "open source platform, commercial training and support" here, but vendors seem to gravitate to per user head and cloud only for more immediate revenue and easier support., but again many enterprises still have huge internal only IT landscape's, because cloud is still expensive and the value often isn't seen in relatively static envs.
It's possible this niche has been filled now too, it's been a while since I looked...
Possibly they can be introduced on a "just those who need it" basis, but honestly that's just so bloody tiring for internal tools, not to mention demotivating as you can no longer build tools for "everyone or anyone", it's back to specific narrow business cases, not IT empowerment, but narrow business case also means your usually competing with cots tools or consultants.
It's also because knowing where the escape hatch and how to use it requires greater than average development skill and finesse and it isn't at all obvious when this is required.
The people who use these platforms aren't usually able to tell what kind of problem requires a developer and what kind of problem requires them doing just a bit more research. They're usually vaguely aware that the limit is out there somewhere but in the specific instances when they hit it they often don't know it's happened.
I've also seen some low code platforms get a little excitable about the idea of nearly or even fully reinventing the turing complete programming language to introduce more flexibility to their platform and make that their escape hatch. This is when things go really downhill.
Whenever I've discussed this, the common theme is that business users continue to request features that would be easily achieved in the low-code platform being used. It's hard to blame them; that's been standard procedure for them for their entire career.
But if you're not strict about saying "no", you still end up writing all the same methods but now on top of that you have a GUI that's not providing any value. Or maybe worse, your developers end up maintaining all of the low-code stuff too when they could have just written the code, switching context pointlessly and (probably, depending on the platform) not using source control.
* Where was the design doc?
* Where were the alerts?
* Where was the code review?
* Why didn't you write an integration test?
* What do you mean it just rolled out to production instantly?
When we're considering options in advance of building something, it's a more time-efficient, less wasteful alternative to programming. But having built it, everyone acknowledges that what we have done is programming, and now they wonder why we've programmed so badly.
Maybe the standard IDEs, Git, code review, CI, metrics, and incremental deploy workflows were fine actually?
Without discipline, any programming environment can lead to failures.
It is true that there aren't any well-defined workflows for using an arrow-boxes environments but that does not mean that these environments don't support specific workflows.
I'd be really interested in knowing how often escape hatches like that are actually used. I'd guess it's less than a fraction of a percent, if ever.
And most apps use about 10 to 20 plugins.
That escape hatch is absolutely necessary for longevity though. It lets you keep your low-code environment simple because you can leave it and write real code when necessary, rather than forcing everything into an over-complicated and under-capable custom thing with no editor tooling.