What is this?
This is the revised 2021 version of my Intro to AWS Amplify: Build a multi-tenant SaaS app Series originally developed as part of an event organised by the Melbourne AWS Programming and Tools Meetup. For this 2021 edition, I’ve done a complete update to cover off all the changes in Amplify over the last 2 years and included some additional tips around using cloud9.
This series contains instructions and assets to build your first AWS Amplify application with React and Node JS hosted on AWS. It is split up into 6 Parts, each containing instructions to get your first Amplify project published.
- Preparation – Provides an introduction and instructions on creating the required AWS environment via the use of Cloud9
- Application Setup – This section outlines the steps to setup out new Amplify application and host it in a repository.
- Deployment Setup – Now that we have our base application configured, we can setup out deployment pipelines
- Application Development – In this part, we start building out our applications functionality
- Trigger Deployment – Next we can go ahead and push our changes into our automated pipelines
- Adding Search – Finally, we can add some search functionality to our application and deploy our changes to production
What is AWS Amplify
AWS Amplify is a suite of tools and services aimed and helping accelerate the development of mobile and web applications on AWS. It can really be broken up into three main components:
Amplify Framework
The Amplify framework is a collection of open-source client libraries the provide use-case centric, opinionated, declarative, and easy-to-use interfaces across different categories of cloud power operations. They provide a simple way to leverage AWS powered services in a easy to use manner. They support a range of platforms including Android, iOS, JavaScript (which in turn support React, React Native, Angular, Ionic and Vue) and flutter. This provides developers with an easy and fast way to solve common use cases including:
- Authentication
- DataStorage
- Geo Location
- Analytics
- AI/ML
- Push Notifications
- Publish/Subscribe
and more. Documentation on the Amplify Framework and it’s open-source libraries can be found here.
The Amplify Admin UI
The Amplify admin UI further simplifies the configuration of backends with a visual point-and-click experience that works seamlessly with the Amplify CLI. The admin UI also includes functionality for managing app content and users. This workshop doesn’t specifically leverage the Admin UI, but we will take a look at how it could be leveraged to expand our solution.
Amplify Console
The Amplify console is the central hub of your full-stack application and is accessible from the AWS management console. From here you can leverage additional features such as static web hosting service, create/delete backend environments, setup CI/CD on the front end and backend.
Preparation
Before we get started
in order to follow along with this walk through, you’ll need to already have the following:
- AWS Account We will be using AWS as our Cloud provider. sign-up here if you don’t already have one
- Github Account to download this repository into your Cloud9 instance.
1. Browse to the Cloud9 Management https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloud9/home/product?region=us-east-1.
2. Create a new Cloud9 environment by clicking the “create environment” button available on the right hand side of the landing page.
3. Give your environment a name and click “Next step“. For this example I’m using “Amplify-Workshop“.
4.here we can configure your environment settings, but for this workshop we will can just click the “Next step“.
5. Review the environment details and click “Create environment“.
6. Wait for the creation of your Cloud9 instance to complete. This can take a few minutes.
7. Once you see your new Cloud9 IDE, you are now ready to move onto Part 1 of the amplify series.
Conclusion
you should now have your AWS account with a Cloud9 instance running in the us-east-1 region. At this point in time, you are now ready to move onto Part 1 (to be published Sunday 17th October 2021) of the series where we will start to install and configure our new Todo application.
