I'm having some confusion here and wanted to see if someone can set me straight.
I'm using Amplify for a Vue app. It calls API Gateway which calls Lambda and all of this is set up manually but I want to use the power of IaaS and do it with SAM.
Amplify CLI includes the ability to add APIs/Functions and in turn creates the CloudFormation Templates and Stack, which is nice. However this doesn't seem to create the Amplify app itself aside from creating an empty app connected to no repo and of course the CLI only stretches to so many services.
I see that it IS possible to configure an Amplify app in CloudFormation. And SAM comes with command line tools that'd be useful as well. What is the correct way to set all this up??
Can I create a SAM template for Amplify creation that works with the Stack created by Amplify to make API/Functions rather than manually building the SAM Template without auto generated assistance? Then if I add non-Amplify-supported Services later I can add them to the SAM as well.
I'm having a time trying to navigate SAM/CF/CDK/Amplify haha
I hope this helps. Lets start with your easier issues:
I'm having a time trying to navigate SAM/CF/CDK/Amplify haha
Yea.
AWS CF (Cloudformation) is aws's go at giving use a way to create(/rud) AWS resources using a templating engine. Its rather massive. And odd. Here's an example from the User Guide
Here is a JSON template to Create a simple DynamoDB table.
Here is that same template from the Designer Link next to it
Here is a pastebin version : 1QNXGTdZ
If the above brings up questions like, Why are both templates different? You are not alone. Overall, CF is massive but pretty neat as it lets you create/rud AWS resources
AWS SAM (Serverless Application Model) IMO is version of CF that is a lot simpler/easier. Here you can CRUD AWS Resources and organize them in a stack.
Note: SAM uses CF under the hood.
Amplify is a framework to make working with cognito (login) , aws js sdks, and more. It can take your vue/react app and add services such as, api, authentication, and document (dynamodb). For a node app, it stores config information in a file calls "aws-exports.js". Amplify can also help you deploy and store your codebase.
If you create any resources using the amplify cli, it uses CF under the hood. I believe all the files get stored in folder named ".amplify". IMO, its not fun as its hard to manage things later on using Amplify CLI or AWS console.
Can I create a SAM template for Amplify creation that works with the Stack created by Amplify to make API/Functions rather than manually building the SAM Template without auto generated assistance?
Yes. Just keep on using that Amplify CLI. Once that stops being fun use the AWS Console.
Then if I add non-Amplify-supported Services later I can add them to the SAM as well.
Also yes. You can create a new SAM stack any time with lambda's, userpools, etc and them connect to them with your Amplify applications new found AWS SDKs.
From my limited experience:
give AWS SAM a shot. Its simple and easier to get than CF
I never use the Amplify CLI anymore. It was neat in the start, but I've outgrown it as running the commands gives me a headache in comparsion to the SAM template defintions
Related
Sorry, I’m sort of a newbie when it comes to Amazon AWS Cloud so sorry if I sound naïve.
For .NET developers, I’ve used Visual Studio 2019’s AWS Lambda project to code Lambda functions and ultimately deploy it to Amazon AWS cloud
However, my concern is that there is No way to version and/or back up the Configurations for the AWS Services ( i.e., S3 bucket, Amazon SNS & SQS, etc.) that are invoked and/or trigger the various AWS Lambda Functions
The problem is that IT developers who configure said AWS Services have to use the ADFS AWS Services console website’s GUI to configure the various AWS Services, and if someone mistakenly deletes an AWS Services then they lose the configuration settings as well?
How do we go about versioning and/or backing up Configurations for the AWS Services?
There are Infrastructure as a Code frameworks like Terraform and Ansible designed to address that.
You can't really delete an AWS service.
it seems like you guys are kind of "new" to AWS so I will recommend using CloudFormation templates as Infrastructure As Code tool. All the configuration of how your AWS resources are supposed to look like can be added to the template and you deploy the template to create your AWS resources. Its AWS-Native and does not cost you anything.
On top of it, you also want to add your CloudFormation templates to version control system.
My AWS Amplify app requires some "seed" data that needs to start in the database. The mechanism by which this runs should not be accessible to users of the app. What is the most idiomatic way to load data into DynamoDB for this purpose?
I have looked into creating a lambda function for this purpose (ie amplify function add), which is well integrated into amplify. However there is no easy way to actually invoke this lambda. Amplify doesn't tell you the lambda ID for use with the aws command, and there is no amplify command that relates to invoking a lambda.
There are a lot of alternative ways to do that. One could be using CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform or other IaC tool to create initial DynamoDB tables and items.
I want to deploy NextJS on AWS using AWS CDK for a POC and was looking at options. In the NextJS docs, it says that we can just create an instance and run npm run build && npm start, it will start the service for us. However, this is not the most optimised way of deploying.
Vercel deploys this in the most optimized way possible:
How can I do the same with AWS? How can I serve the static assets and pages via Cloudfront CDN and the server side rendered pages and APIs via either Lambda or ECS? Is there a step by step guide that I can follow to split out the build files for the same?
Other options I explored
AWS Amplify: As it is a premium service, I feel doing all this by my self would be a lot cheaper and gives me more flexibility in CDK (I am not sure how Amplify works behind the scenes to deploy the nextjs assets on a S3 + Cloudfront + Lambda stack)
serverless framework: There is a plugin to deploy nextjs. But, I want to have full control over the deployment and don't want to depend on any external framework. Want to do it natively using AWS CDK.
Any pointers to do this natively using AWS CDK would be helpful. Thanks.
Deploying Next.js as a serverless application requires a bunch of services when you don't want to pack the whole Next.js server into a single Lambda.
My current setup of AWS services to achieve this looks like the following:
It consists of 3 main resources:
CloudFront
This works as a serverless reverse proxy that routes the traffic from the Internet to S3 (JavaScript, prerendered pages) or Lambda (Server rendered pages).
When using the image optimization capabilities of Next.js you also need an extra service that provides the API for it.
S3
Since you don't want to invoke Lambdas just to serve static content, you need a S3 bucket where those files are stored and served from.
Lambda
The Lambdas are then used to serve the server generated pages (SSR & API).
They contain a minimal version of the Next.js server (e.g. without the static files that are served from S3).
I built this setup with Terraform, so there is no native CDK solution available at this time.
But most of it could be simply translated to CDK since the model behind Terraform and CDK is pretty much the same.
Source code of the Terraform module is available on GitHub: https://github.com/milliHQ/terraform-aws-next-js
AWS Amplify and the "Applications" feature within AWS Lambda seem to have a few things in common:
Both seem to be a wrapper around several AWS resources
Both walk you through a guided setup to provision a working AWS stack
Both set up some CI/CD pipelines for you so that Git commits trigger a build and deploy
So what are the differences between these two services, and what are some scenarios where you might want to choose one over the other?
AWS Amplify is a toolchain for front-end developers to interact with AWS resources. It provides a cli program to manage resources and (JS/Android/iOS) libraries to integrate them into your front-end applications.
It doesn't 'wrap' resources, but is merely a convenience layer to manage them (it is somewhat similar to AWS SAM); Amplify generates CloudFormation templates, stores those locally, and uses aws-cli to provision them. Note that Amplify can also be used just as a front-end library to integrate resources that are already set up.
AWS Lambda Applications is an actual AWS service, or rather a feature of AWS Lambda. It groups related resources, so they can be managed and deployed as if it was a single resource.
... what are
some scenarios where you might want to choose one over the other?
Amplify is aimed at web- and mobile developers: it allows them to manage backend resources without much backend knowledge.
It is not a matter of 'using one over the other'; they can actually be used in conjunction with each other.
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?
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.
AWS Amplify is a very confusing service and consists of many components. I would categorize as follow.
AWS Amplify Console
AWS Amplify CLI
AWS SDK&Libraries to integrate to your mobile or web
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.