What is AWS Amplify?

Amazon Web Services is the world’s biggest cloud platform, and businesses of all shapes and sizes use it every day to run their businesses. You may find this surprising, but AWS accounts for more than half of Amazon's operating income. Thus, Amazon has a vested interest in getting as many people to use AWS as possible, so it offers a whole bunch of tools to make it easy to use. AWS Amplify is one of these.

First launched in late 2017, AWS Amplify is a package of tools and services designed to make it easy for developers to create and launch apps in AWS, including code libraries, ready-to-use components, and a built-in CLI. With AWS Amplify, you can quickly, reliably implement a bunch of features for everything from API to AI.

What’s included in AWS Amplify?

AWS Amplify includes a wide variety of open-source libraries and drag-and-drop UI components developers can use as building blocks for their apps. It also has a built-in CLI you can use to build your backend. And for an additional fee, AWS Amplify Console provides web hosting services for your app.

AWS Amplify has components for:

• Data storage
  • Keep your app data synced with the cloud, manage your distributed data, and handle subscriptions and messaging.
• Analytics
  • Track user sessions and report on their behavior. Set up custom attributes and analyze conversion funnels.
• Push notifications
  • Easily manage your campaigns and send messages to your users across multiple channels, including text, email, and push.
• Authentication
  • Access ready-to-use workflows for MFA, single sign-on, forgot password, etc.
    
    

What is AWS Amplify compatible with?

The framework supports iOS, Android, Web, and React Native mobile apps, and React, Ionic, Angular, and vue.js for web apps.

How much does AWS Amplify cost?

The Amplify framework of libraries, components, etc., is free! You only need to pay for the services you’re using to build/deploy your app; e.g., if you’re using S3 for storage and you add an Amplify storage module, you’ll pay just the usual S3 fees.

For build/deploy and web hosting, there’s an AWS Amplify free tier that applies for 12 months (with certain limitations). After that, for build/deploy it’s $0.01 per build minute, $0.023 per GB of storage per month, and $0.15 for every GB served.

Who should use AWS Amplify?

AWS Amplify is awesome for people who don’t want to build their backend or other components from scratch. The Amplify components make it easy to set up the building blocks of your app without doing all the legwork yourself. 

That’s a pretty broad use case, but that’s the point—it’s meant to appeal to a large base.

What companies have used AWS Amplify?

The public customer list for AWS Amplify isn’t very robust yet. They do have a couple heavy-hitters though, like millennial-favorite fitness app Noom and location tracking cloud service HyperTrack.

There are a lot of other reviews of the service on the web, too: note this one that says using Amplify “feels like cheating.” 

Have you used AWS Amplify to help lay the groundwork for your app? Let us know what you thought.