News

Amazon Cloud Does Mobile Development Reboot

• By David Ramel
• November 28, 2018

Mobile development using the Amazon cloud is undergoing a transformation, with a new site, new tools and new functionality to support iOS, Android, React Native and other apps.

The reboot sees Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) resources previously available under the AWS Mobile Hub being expanded and reorganized under the AWS Amplify umbrella.

AWS launched the Mobile Hub in 2015, somewhat playing catch-up in the cloud-hosted Mobile-Back-End-as-a-Service (MBaaS) arena. It provided services such as online/offline data, authentication, analytics, push notifications and so on.

Yesterday (Nov. 27), the company announced its mobile development services have a new home at AWS Amplify, described as "an opinionated set of libraries, UI components, and a command line interface to build an app backend and integrate it with your iOS, Android, Web, and React Native apps."

AWS Amplify is composed of:

• The open source client Amplify Framework -- those aforementioned opinionated libraries/components/CLI -- that leverage AWS Cloud Services such as AWS AppSync (offline-capable data-layer API) and Amazon Cognito (user identity management) for back-end functionality.
• Developer tools, including the new AWS Amplify Console for Web app building, deployment and hosting.
• AWS Device Farm for the real-world testing of mobile apps on iOS and Android devices.

AWS Amplify was originally launched a year ago as an open source JavaScript library designed to ease the development of cloud-connected mobile and Web apps, along with AWS AppSync.

While existing AWS mobile developers can continue to use the AWS Mobile Hub, the company suggested all new development switch to AWS Amplify and said it would encourage the migration of existing apps to the new service over the coming months.

Along with the reorganization, AWS introduced the AWS Amplify Console to ease deployment of Web apps. "With the AWS Amplify Console, you create a project and link it to your source code repository (located in GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, or Amazon CodeCommit). The AWS Amplify Console enables you to provision your backend resources, build your application, and deploy it to a CDN-powered, secure Web site," the Nov. 27 blog post states. "This helps you to continuously and automatically deploy both the backend and frontend resources that you configured through the Amplify CLI just by checking in a change to your source code repository."

AWS said more of its cloud services will be optimized to work with AWS Amplify in the future, while noting the changeover has already begun with the relocation of all mobile and Web SDK documentation to the new site "as we moved the iOS and Android native SDKs towards the same category-based programming model" that the Amplify JavaScript library follows.