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Michael Labieniec edited this page Dec 21, 2017 · 9 revisions

Overview

AWS Amplify aims to enhance the development experience using JavaScript with AWS. Amplify codifies best practices through programmatic interfaces to help you effortlessly interact with cloud resources.

Principles

First and foremost Amplify exposes to you WHAT things do and then HOW best to do them. The WHAT is at a functional use case with HOW being an opinionated implementation that you can override with “escape hatches.” This will allow you to have higher velocity and build better applications by focusing less on implementation choices. Secondly, Amplify should be a manifestation of The Rule of Least Power when developing against AWS. This means it encourages architectural and programmatic best practices and the ability to start quickly. This shows by encouraging certain services (API Gateway usage vs. direct DynamoDB interaction) or certain connection patterns (Circuit breaker, retry counts and throttle up/down).

  1. Opinionated implementations: There are many ways to interface with AWS Services. Certain service interactions are favored over others. For instance if sending and receiving JSON we can prefer an API Gateway endpoint to other mechanisms. Amplify will programmatically help optimize for cost and performance through library decisions.

  2. Declarative actions: Amplify will provide you a reference to a generic client object and ability to perform common actions. “RegisterUser”, “Login”, “SendObject”, “UpdateObject”, “StreamData”. By default you should not need to worry about AWS Service specific API operations like putItem() with a unique hash or even HTTP verbs.

  3. Cascading service interaction: Certain actions in a declarative style can have overlapping or ambiguous AWS Service implementations. With an opinionated implementation we can decide which Services are "primary" and which are "secondary" depending on what is configured. For instance sending an image will prefer S3 over API Gateway..

  4. Simple, standard data objects: Sending & Receiving data to AWS Services can have many parameters, which tend to show up in the SDKs. These are abstracted and inferred, where possible, with simple JSON that the implementation can reason about. Standard parameters (bucket names, stream names, partition keys, etc.) that are part of the implementation are extracted from a simplified configuration file and dynamically generated/updated in order to further allow focus on state and data types only.

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