Introduction to Amplify - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

- [Instructor] Amplify is an open-source library that you can use to build sophisticated, cloud-powered mobile and web apps. Now, if that's true and I think it is, then I'd have to say Amplify might be your new, best friend or at least employee of the month. And you can learn more about Amplify at aws-amplify.github.io, and we'll do that in a few minutes. But you might be asking yourself, "That's a big promise, how does it do it?" Well, Amplify provides a command line interface to do the heavy lifting on AWS for you. Now, before you get too scared by command line interface, don't worry. If you're like command line interfaces are mysterious, a bunch of text flies across my screen and I'm just hoping not to see anything in red or the word error, and I don't know what it did and I just hope it worked. Well, Amplify CLI is a little bit better than that. It does provide a lot of good feedback but we'll also be looking at what it does behind the scenes on AWS, so we can feel confident that what it's doing for us is the right thing and saving us a ton of time. Well, what does it do for us? What is this heavy lifting? Well, it helps us integrate our app with cloud operations, so things like functionality, data storage, file storage. It handles that integration for us. The command line interfaces helps us with quick setup and configuration so we don't have to click around to a lot of different websites and type a lot of different things in. It's all in one place. And then that local configuration can be deployed to the server and that's our new app's backend. So anything like functionality, schemas, anything like that we'll do locally and then upload it to the server. Well that sounds great, anything else? Certainly. If you want to host your app on AWS, it can handle that hosting for you. Amplify's CLI can configure the hosting and also publish it to the server. Amplify also supplies some UI components for things like authorization, storage and probably more coming. I've seen it grow in a very short period of time. It also handles things like monitoring usage with campaign analytics, so you can add analytics to your app really quickly. As I mentioned, let's go check out the website. So here at the Amplify website, we have a nice, clean website that gives us a lot of information, but we'll pretty quickly that a lot of the information goes to the same place. So the website we'll look at first has a get started. If I click on that, it goes to a simple page that tells me to sign up for an AWS account, install the CLI and then start building our app. If we click on one of these get started, we'll see that we just go to a page that gives us a walkthrough and other information on things we can add to your app. So let's go back to the beginning again, and if we scroll down a little bit, we see that there's three things: the library, the toolchain and the UI components. If I click on the library, it's just going to go right here, and it's going to show me all the different things I can add. And if I click on one of these like storage, notice it goes back to the same page where we had our getting started tutorial and different features; it just selected storage for us, so nothing new there. If we go to the toolchain, it just explains things that we can add to our app using the command line interface. And again, if we click on the learn more we go back to this same page to get us started using the CLI. And finally, we have the UI components. Again, the same page, it's just got UI components selected for us for authentication, storage and interactions. So very manageable website of information that we can learn about AWS. These all go basically to the same pages again, except for the API; that's more of documentation. So, it's very easy to get into your head how to learn everything about Amplify. We're going to cover most of this stuff in this course and you'll feel very confident about how you can add things like authorization UI, add additional categories to your app using the CLI, and publishing it all to the server.