AWS Amplify & Serverless-Stack

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I am currently looking into AWS Amplify as well as I am reading Serverless Stack. My goal is to create a simple ToDo list app. Both "Getting started" / Documentations seem to have the same goal. However, AWS Amplify guide seems to be way easier from the setup.

And that's where I am confused. As far as I understand AWS Amplify also uses DynamoDB and gets data via GraphQL. But where is the difference between these two documentations?

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amazon-web-servicesserverlessaws-amplify
@JC - serverless-stack.com has a great and very detailed tutorial on building a serverless API in the form of a traditional REST API and using AWS Cognito for authentication. While AWS-Amplify is building GraphQL API with API kes authentication. Same concepts - a bit different implementations. – lentyai

2 Answers

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Serverless Stack is a resource providing guidance on how to create serverless applications with AWS. It was created by a company called Anomaly Innovations.

AWS Amplify is an open source framework maintained by AWS which helps developers integrate their applications with AWS resources.

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AWS Amplify is a very confusing service and consists of many components. I would categorize as follow.

  1. AWS Amplify Console
  2. AWS Amplify CLI
  3. AWS SDK&Libraries to integrate to your mobile or web
  4. AWS Appsync Transformer

AWS Amplify Console gives you the ability to easily to setup Continous Deployment for your Amplify project. Amplify Console use together with AWS Amplify CLI for you to manage different environments.
Let's say you want to start the Todo App. You start on your local using Amplify CLI and create API Gateway/Lambda/DynamoDB stacks.
Amplify CLI lets you create the whole stack easily and push it to AWS to deploy the whole stack. Then you can create a different environment based on the same stacks, let's say you want your dev environment, and QA environment and production environment.
Amplify CLI gives you all the commands necessary for you to achieve this, then if you want to auto-deploy the change to AWS when someone push the code to your Git repository, you can use the Amplify Console to set up exactly that.
Amplify Console also integrate with AWS Domain so, you can easily point your own domain to any of the environment.
On top of these, Amplify also provides, GraphQL Transformer, which you can easily define the GraphQL schema in Amplify format and it will transform and deploy to AWS Appsync. And there is a Mobile SDK which you can sync data between AppSync and you're mobile and provides some UIs as well.

We used one of our web projects and we liked it for Continues Deployment aspect of the Amplify, but we didn't like the AppSync(GraphQL) aspect of Amplify just b/c it was not easy to implement layered resolver.

Also, keep in mind that Amplify CLI/SDK/Transformer is under one project and it's still very fragile. You can take a look at the version history from https://www.npmjs.com/package/@aws-amplify/cli and you will see few version bump just in a single month. There were many obvious bugs we encounter, even on the AWS Console.

I haven't use the Serverless yet, but as long as I know, Serverless provides No1 and No2 of Amplify with greater stability.