AWS Amplify – Is It Really Worth Using It As a Production Solution?

Very rapid prototyping

With the AWS Amplify platform, the basic stuff is provided in the in-the-box platform so that you do not need to start coding from scratch; this speeds up the App development process, and you can set up a prototype of an Amplify project even in one day.

Easy start without AWS knowledge

AWS has a huge ecosystem with many different solutions – with Amplify, you don’t need to care about which services are being used and for what – AWS Amplify will do it for you. (This is also a con in some way of AWS amplify framework).

Nice multiple environment handling

You can set up a feature-based deployment without impacting other environments like staging, production or other developer space. This deployment has its own domain and its own backend services that allows you to develop and test your changes before moving to the next step in your workflow.

Hard to go “outside of the box”

Probably your application will grow from day to day, and someday, you might collide with the reality that you need some solution that is not integrated into AWS Amplify you can try to modify CloudFormation templates on your own, but it needs your CloudFormation knowledge, and it doesn’t guarantee that someday the AWS Amplify CLI doesn’t overwrite your changes. Another way is to use CDK, which also requires knowledge of it.

Hard to maintain because of consistent change

AWS Amplify platform is growing very fast, which means it is constantly updated. The new changes and updates that are implemented require you as AWS amplify user/developer to learn and constantly keep up regularly otherwise, you might stay even on two major outdated releases, and upgrading from that point is really a pain in the back.

Too much magic

AWS Amplify generates and sets up services for you – you cannot control which AWS service is being used, and you don’t even need to know that, which also blocks you from learning the “real” AWS components.

Linear growing of Github issues

The issues in AWS Amplify GitHub repositories are growing from day to day, so the new bugs or feature requests are faster than the contributions from the Amplify community (there is even an issue created in 2017). So if you have a brush with any missing feature or bug that is already created in their repositories, it doesn’t guarantee that it will be solved this year.

AWS is a perfect tool to use when your project has a well-defined roadmap, and this need matches its capabilities. As much as AWS Amplify offers a wide range of capabilities, it is only recommendable for handling small projects with well-defined goals, for instance, an app at the starting stage. When an app grows or scales, using AWS amplify becomes complicated.

The fact that AWS Amplify is not recommendable to use for a large project does not mean that it is totally of no use; here are some of the projects you can actually work on effectively using AWS Amplify.

MVP Project/Prototypes

When you quickly need to set up a project that will be started over again, Amplify it’s a good choice – the built-in toolbox gives you really quick prototyping, so your MVP will be quickly deployed even for free with an AWS Amplify free tier.

Static site hosting

If you want to host a static web app AWS Amplify is a perfect choice, to be honest, you don’t need to worry about infrastructure, deployments, scaling, CDN and caching –  Amplify does it for you.

For any bigger or more complicated projects, I recommend you look for some of the AWS Amplify alternatives like Firebase, Azure App Service, or Supabase, but make sure that they match your requirements. Maybe you have something well-tested else to recommend – drop it below.