AWS Amplify is one of the many development services in the AWS platform that helps you build extensible, full-stack web and mobile apps faster. This revolutionary service allows you to easily start your application development and automatically scale your resources with less management overhead as it uses serverless services.
Put simply, AWS Amplify deploys your application in a serverless architecture without any manual intervention on your part – forever changing the way you develop applications. It also gives you the option to integrate Machine Learning capabilities into your applications!
Personally, I like this service as it allows me to create a variety of web and mobile applications in a flash! The data models can be easily added and launched using its intuitive UI, which is then deployed to AppSync. Frontend development is also a breeze since it can integrate with Figma, or to its native UI components easily.
Put simply, AWS Amplify is a set of purpose-built tools and features. It consists of the Amplify Studio, Amplify Libraries, Amplify CLI, Amplify Hosting, and many more. Let’s quickly cover its different modules one by one.
Amplify Studio is a visual development environment that simplifies the development of your web and mobile apps. You can easily build your frontend UI with its set of ready-to-use UI components, which you can directly connect to your app backend. Since your UI components are already pre-built, the number of your boilerplate code will be reduced, allowing you more time to focus on implementing the application business logic.
You can define your data models, implement user authentication, and add file storage using the Amplify Studio without any backend expertise. In addition, you can import Figma prototypes built by your application designers into the Amplify Studio for more seamless collaboration.
The AWS Amplify Libraries are open-source JavaScript libraries in the Amplify Framework. These are specifically designed to aid you in building AWS-powered mobile and web apps. The Amplify JavaScript libraries are supported in React, React Native, Angular, Ionic, Vue, and different web and mobile frameworks.
The Amplify Command Line Interface is a CLI toolchain that you can use to configure and maintain your app backend straight from your local desktop. The Amplify CLI has an interactive workflow and intuitive use cases that you can leverage, such as authentication, storage, and API. It allows you to test your features locally and deploy your app to multiple environments. This tool provides infrastructure-as-code templates which are automatically loaded to CloudFormation or AWS SAM. With the Amplify CLI, you can have a much effective team collaboration and easy integration with Amplify’s CI/CD workflow.
It also has a feature called Amplify Hosting, which allows you to host secure, reliable, fast web apps or websites via the AWS content delivery network. Under the hood, it deploys your applications to Amazon CloudFront’s content delivery network, which comes with hundreds of points of presence globally. Amplify Hosting also allows you to set up your own custom domain for your applications and add custom alarms that send notifications if a certain metric exceeds a threshold that you specify.
Here are some features in the Amplify Studio that I used to easily create an app:
The UI Library allows you to sync your Figma designs or build your own forms:
Forms can be created with its intuitive UI. You can start with a Blank form, a data model you or a static JSON object:
It has lots of UI elements to choose from such as autocomplete, DateField, EmailField and many others:
For example, you can add a “TextField” element for the First Name field of your form:
The label can be changed to “First Name” et voila, the first element of your form is done!
These are some of the tools and features available in AWS Amplify that you can leverage with. Aside from Amplify Studio, Amplify Libraries, Amplify CLI, and Amplify Hosting, there are many other features and tools in AWS Amplify that you can try out, and AWS is adding more features soon to fast-track your software development experience!
AWS Amplify can indeed amplify your development capabilities!