AWS Week In Review: AWS AppSync and Amplify
It was a slower week of announcements following the San Francisco summit. But, there still a few interesting, new things all the same. Here’s the latest and greatest…
AWS AppSync: GraphQL as a Service
What is GraphQL?
GraphQL is a different kind of API that typically works best with a rich frontend application and a backend made of many datasources. This is because GraphQL provides fine-grained querying ability to clients and makes it easy for API developers to plug in different backend APIs — very common in microservice architectures.
Along with Microservices and Single-Page Applications in recent years, GraphQL has increased in popularity. It’s become many application developers first choice when architecting their APIs. It makes sense in a lot of cases. GraphQL allows developers to grant more control to the clients and consumers and can be easier to develop against in some cases than a REST API.
AWS Amplify and AWS AppSync
First, AWS AppSync is simply Amazon Web Service’s GraphQL managed service. With AppSync, an architect can create a GraphQL API within minutes. AppSync has been in closed beta for some time now. During this past week, AppSync entered General Availability. Check out the QuickStart guide to get started: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appsync/latest/devguide/quickstart.html
Alternatively, this might be a good time to try out AWS Amplify instead of the QuickStart guide because this week, AWS announced support for AWS ApplySync in their open-source AWS Amplify library.
AWS Amplify is a set of tools and libraries collected together to make Cloud Native JavaScript applications on AWS. Using AWS Amplify, a developer can bootstrap a React application with features ranging from analytics, authentication, API services (AWS AppSync/GraphQL), database management, deployment, and caching.
It’s a rapidly developed project with lots of promising features. I haven’t gotten a chance to try it yet but I plan on trying it out soon and writing about it in a future post. In the mean time, you can read more about AWS Amplify with the Quickstart Guide: https://aws.github.io/aws-amplify/media/quick_start
Read more about the announcements at these links below:
- AWS Amplify Adds Support for GraphQL and AWS AppSync Enabling Real-time Data Capabilities in JavaScript Applications
- AWS AppSync now Generally Available (GA) with new GraphQL Features
Other Notable Announcements
- Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) now Supports AWS PrivateLink
- Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility Supports Fast Database Cloning
- AWS AppSync now Generally Available (GA) with new GraphQL Features
Previous AWS Week In Review
