The CTO’s Guide to building fullstack applications with AWS Amplify

As CTO, you are responsible for overseeing your engineering team’s technology strategy and guiding decisions around frameworks, architectures, and infrastructure. Choosing the right technology stack is crucial for building robust, scalable applications while maximizing developer productivity. This blog post will explain why building fullstack applications with AWS Amplify’s new code-first developer experience (Gen 2) should be at the core of your web development stack.

Amplify Gen 2 has reimagined the developer experience of building fullstack applications on AWS to meet the requirements of modern web developers. Leveraging TypeScript and code-first DX solutions like the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), Amplify allows developers the ability to write code, not configuration to provision infrastructure on AWS.

The Benefits of TypeScript

TypeScript is a statically typed superset of JavaScript that compiles down to plain JavaScript. Using TypeScript for frontend and backend web development provides several key benefits:

• Catch Errors Early: TypeScript’s static typing catches a whole class of errors during compilation that would otherwise only show up at runtime. This leads to more robust code and fewer bugs in production.
• Improved Developer Productivity: Types provide Intellisense, autocompletion, and inline documentation in IDEs like Visual Studio Code. This makes developers more productive.
• Easier Refactoring: The type system makes large refactors safer by immediately alerting developers to incompatible changes.
• Self-Documenting Code: The explicit types make code more self-documenting compared to vanilla JavaScript. This makes it easier for new team members to ramp up quickly.
• Future-Proof Code: TypeScript makes it easier to migrate to new frameworks and paradigms like React Hooks by forcing you to decouple logic from frameworks.

The bottom line is TypeScript makes your developers happier and more productive while creating code that has fewer bugs and is easier to maintain.

Code-first DX with the AWS CDK

Managing infrastructure manually is slow, error-prone and difficult to reproduce accurately across environments. Code-first solutions like the AWS CDK allow you to define all your infrastructure in a declarative way using a real programming language like TypeScript. These capabilities allow for extensibility in leverage the breadth and power of AWS services as application and infrastructure needs evolve.

Here are some key benefits of managing your infrastructure as code with the AWS CDK:

• Codify Best Practices: Define your architecture as code and codify best practices for security, reliability and compliance.
• Quickly Provision Environments: Spin up dev, test, staging environments for your applications in minutes. Destroy and recreate them just as quickly.
• Efficient Updates: Make updates to your stack across all environments quickly through code.
• Cost Optimization: The AWS CDK makes it easy to leverage cost-optimizing services like spot instances and auto-scaling.
• Infrastructure Testing: Use AWS CDK to write unit and integration tests for your infrastructure to prevent errors before deployment.

The AWS CDK allows your infrastructure to be version controlled and deployed as part of your CI/CD pipeline just like application code. This is a huge boost for developer productivity and business agility.

AWS Amplify and a Code-first DX

The advent of AWS Amplify Gen 2 marks the next-generation in fullstack application development, catering specifically to the needs of frontend teams. This powerful toolkit empowers developers to build robust, scalable applications with speed and reduced complexity. Here’s why and how AWS Amplify Gen 2 is a game-changer in the realm of fullstack development.

Developer Speed and Efficiency

AWS Amplify Gen 2 introduces a TypeScript-based, code-first approach, significantly enhancing the developer experience (DX). This shift allows frontend developers to define backends directly in TypeScript, streamlining the development process. By expressing an app’s data model, business logic, authentication, and authorization rules in TypeScript, developers can deploy cloud infrastructure without the hassle of manually configuring underlying AWS services. This results in a dramatic increase in development speed, as the need to stitch together various services is eliminated.

Less Code, More Power

The file-based convention followed by AWS Amplify Gen 2 adheres to the principle of “convention over configuration”. It means developers spend less time writing boilerplate code and more time focusing on building features. With resources grouped by type in separate files, such as one for authentication and another for data, the structure becomes intuitive and easy to manage. Additionally, the use of TypeScript ensures strict typing and IntelliSense support in IDEs like Visual Studio Code, reducing errors and further speeding up the development process.

Empowering Frontend Teams with Fullstack Capabilities

With AWS Amplify Gen 2, frontend teams now have the power to build everything fullstack at record speeds and with less friction. The provision of per-developer cloud sandbox environments optimized for faster iterations allows individual team members to work on fullstack features independently without interfering with each other’s work. This parallel development capability is crucial in reducing time-to-market for new features.

Moreover, the fullstack Git-based environments align seamlessly with modern development workflows. Each ephemeral environment correlates directly to a Git branch, allowing for easy testing and integration of new features. A pull request or feature branch can be previewed before they are merged into production. Because of the code-first approach, all backend resources are defined as code for reproducibility and portability across branches. This Git-centric approach ensures that the repository always remains the single source of truth, simplifying the promotion of features from development to production environments.

Conclusion

AWS Amplify Gen 2 fundamentally changes how frontend teams approach fullstack development using a Code-first DX with TypeScript and the AWS CDK. By emphasizing developer speed, reducing the need for excessive code, and providing robust fullstack capabilities, it allows teams to build more efficiently and effectively than other solutions. These capabilities can result is lower development costs and faster time-to-market for new products and features for organizations looking to stay ahead in the fast-paced world of software development. Get started with AWS Amplify’s new code-first developer experience (Gen 2) and learn more about building modern applications on AWS.