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AWS AppSync – Build data-driven apps with real-time and off-line capabilities
- obilgic 9y agoWould love to hear from www.graph.cool folks
- schickling 9y agoHi obilgic, thanks a lot for the shout out! This is a super exciting announcement from the side of AWS which is really well aligned with some of our upcoming product changes. Expect some news in the next couple of weeks!
- thawab 9y agoIf you want to have a look at the console, they showed a demo on the twitch stream https://www.twitch.tv/videos/205044748?t=01h21m05s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/205044748?t=01h21m05s
- appwiz 9y agoThanks for posting the link. We have a deep dive at re:Invent later this afternoon if anyone is interested in attending.
- desireco42 9y agoThis is actually something I thought it should be good to be service and it is great Amazon decided to make it. I didn't look into details, so hopefully it can be used without big issues. Really cool.
- schickling 9y agoHi, co-founder of Graphcool here. It's very exciting to see AWS adopting GraphQL as a part of their offering. GraphQL in combination with serverless functions is a great fit to build applications quickly and shines in the use case described by AppSync. P.S. We'll soon release a few example of how to use AppSync together with Graphcool (which works really well together!)
- the_duke 9y agoIsn't this basically a copy of Graphcool? I was actually just about to comment how it sucks for startups that AWS will just grab every good idea, duplicate it and draw a lot of business because, since you have everything on AWS, it's very tempting to just use their offering.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- schickling 9y agoWhile there are a couple of similar elements (you can rudimentary read and write data), the use case AppSync is trying to tackle is very different. It's main use case is not to act as the core of your application but rather as a wrapper around various AWS data sources. There's a new concept called schema stitching which enables you to combine (and re-expose) GraphQL APIs which will make it possible to build a simple server that stitches together both Graphcool (as your primary data backend) and AppSync to easily access other information stored in AWS services. (You can read more about schema stitching here: https://www.advancedgraphql.com/content/schema-stitching https://www.advancedgraphql.com/content/schema-stitching)
- foota 9y agoCould you also write a client side graphql server to do the stitching locally? Is there a reason you wouldn't want to in general?
- meritt 9y agoEdit - Nevermind, I must have confused the personal experience of myself and multiple people in my professional network with a satirical television show.
- bradleyankrom 9y agoThat is interesting - can you recall some instances of this occurring?
- willchen 9y agoA bit confusing that there's blue, underlined text that look a lot like links. Perhaps this was posted too early and should actually link to more in-depth docs?
- talawahdotnet 9y agoInteresting so the data is actually stored in a datasource like DynamoDB and this is a managed GraphQL service that you can use to handle auth, mapping, subscriptions etc
- nslog 9y agoDynamoDB is just one of the data sources that you can use, and any of them can be used for Realtime data with GraphQL subscriptions as well as authorization schemes: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appsync/latest/devguide/tutorials.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appsync/latest/devguide/tutorial... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appsync/latest/devguide/real-time-data.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appsync/latest/devguide/real-tim... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appsync/latest/devguide/security.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appsync/latest/devguide/security...
- tal_berzniz 9y agoAmazon is amazing at creating scaleable and reliable services, but their UX and the way they announce new products is awful. There's room for startups to wrap these services into something more usable. There are already good examples: netlify, graph.cool, dashbird and others.
- actualanswer 9y agoAnd Heroku!
- avitzurel 9y agoI still think there is HUGE room for a service company that will wrap Amazon services in an economic way. The value proposition here is incredible, you can save so much money for companies. At my previous company, I changed one of the data ingestion architecture and saved 250,000$ in YEARLY AWS bill. Of course, there are many problems with this, but I still think there is room for this. Right now, this knowledge is in silos in companies. Lots of companies should benefit from this.
- schickling 9y agoThanks a great point, avitzurel! This will be exactly one of the core offerings what we're currently working on at Graphcool. AWS provides great building blocks but using them efficiently is a major challenge (especially for smaller teams). Like in your case, there is an enormous potential in better resource utilization!
- kbd 9y agoSeems promising. I'd be interested to know how this compares to something like RethinkDB for "realtime" (awful word we've settled on to describe changefeeds and such) apps.
- nslog 9y agoRealtime capabilities in AppSync are controlled by the developer with an event-based model using GraphQL Subscriptions: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appsync/latest/devguide/real-time-data.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appsync/latest/devguide/real-tim...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Welytech 9y agoGet post I was enlightened
- appwiz 9y agoAWS AppSync tech lead here. If you'd like to request access, please go to https://pages.awscloud.com/awsappsyncpreview.html https://pages.awscloud.com/awsappsyncpreview.html
- mstrum 9y agoI cannot say this enough times, but these landing pages are just terrible, as well as mixed results in how well it does or does not work.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ChrisBland 9y agoHow hard would it be to put this behind an Amazon auth so I don’t have to fill in all of this data which amazon already has?
- nslog 9y agoAppSync has comprehensive Auth functionality including both AWS IAM and Amazon Cognito, plus FGAC capabilities for you to implement custom rules: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appsync/latest/devguide/security.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appsync/latest/devguide/security...
- dc_gregory 9y ago(I think they meant the forms AWS puts up, which could have a "login and fill AWS account details" button to automatically fill the thing out).
- colmmacc 9y agoPretty hard :) We should do better (I work at AWS) to be more seamless, but we also take protecting customer data very seriously. Internally, it's quite a process, with security and legal and compliance reviews and multi-level approvals, to get access to any information associated with a customer account. I find that re-assuring! That's one reason for the landing pages like this, which can have their own T&C and it's more clear that the information is being volunteered to team running the preview. It also means the data can be discarded when the preview is done.
- marknadal 9y agoWant something similar without the lock in? The community has recently added GraphQL query capabilities (including realtime updates, like Firebase!) to gun, fully Open Source: https://github.com/brysgo/graphql-gun https://github.com/brysgo/graphql-gun (note, I'm the author of gun, but not the GraphQL extension)
- xrd 9y agoGun is awesome but I'm still confused about mobile support. Has that story changed?
- marknadal 9y agoMobile support works when using things like React Native, phonegap, ionic, etc. but we don't have any Swift/Objective-C/Java drivers yet - however, I recently did a talk on how to port gun into a new language, so I'm hoping some contributors could help out: https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/porting-gun https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/porting-gun Thanks for asking! Definitely a hard one, any other issues we need to address still, that I can put on my radar?
- tootie 9y agoGoogle Firebase and Azure Mobile App Service already offer offline sync. This is a catch-up move.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- xrd 9y agoBut, Firebase only exists at Google and has serious limitations.
- thesandlord 9y agoCurious to know what limitations you've found. With the new Firestore DB a lot of the old Firebase RTDB scale/query restrictions have been lifted. (I work for Google)
- xrd 9y agoI found it really hard to play with Firebase because it is only available hosted from Google. I like to tinker with things that I can run locally and it was so much work (relative to other technologies) to get a staging environment established. For example, I'm building lots of things with docker so I can setup and tear down really quickly.
- gregwebs 9y agoThis AWS announcement is quite exciting. For those wondering what else is available, I can share some recent research into available graphQL backend systems (but I have not used them past demo yet). These 3 hosted solutions all have a similar feature set. That includes support for enum types, uniqueness, required, and relations * GraphCMS * Scaphold * Graphcool GraphCMS is probably the most user friendly around schema creation, but that may not matter to you if you are an app developer. If you just want to declare a GraphQL schema there is Graph Front. There are also open source GraphQL backends * https://github.com/jscomplete/graphfront (Postgres) * https://github.com/postgraphql/postgraphql (Postgres) * http://join-monster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ * https://rest-layer.io/ (MongoDB, Sqlite3, Google DataStore) You can also now run Graphcool on your own infrastructure. As a disclaimer, GraphQL was not designed to not be mapped to a data store like this. However, these technologies are at least a great way to prototype a backend.
- schickling 9y agoThanks for sharing these resources! Regarding your last point stating that "these technologies are at least a great way to prototype a backend.": We've taken this feedback extremely seriously and are extracting the core of Graphcool as a standalone component which is a "GraphQL database". While it's not as user friendly (as of a visual user interface) it's meant as a foundation for highly scalable systems (based on the architectures you might find at Twitter or Facebook). I'm very happy to hear more of your concerns and answer any questions!
- gdi2290 9y agoAppSync is Scaphold
- hbcondo714 9y agoThese GraphQL provider offerings are great but it appears none of them offer a way to monetize[1] an API. Is GraphQL just not akin to this? [1] https://apigee.com/api-management/#/products?jump=slider_group_section7&sub=3 https://apigee.com/api-management/#/products?jump=slider_gro...
- Hendrixer 9y agoCoFounder and CEO of Tipe here. I think AppSync is amazing. Using GraphQL with AWS services is simple. This is a no-brainer for Enterprise. We're using some of this tech to offer enterprise support for our customers. Check us out and signup for beta, https://tipe.io https://tipe.io
- MentallyRetired 9y agoVery nice. Tipe is almost a direct featureset clone of a CMS I built in 2006, just done much better. And with todays tech its probably a lot easier to develop. No disrespect to what you're doing, you're still putting in insane amounts of work to have this function. Definitely my new favorite CMS approach. Power anything from websites to electronic billboards... love it. Mine was called Calypso.io :)
- MentallyRetired 9y agoAlso, the slack link at the end of your "request access" page is expired. :)
- mlukaszczyk 9y agoHey! Co-Founder of GraphCMS here. Super excited to see that more and more tech giants see the huge value in GraphQL. This is a great day for the community. I am also a huge fan of the Graphcool service and I definitely see great integration potential here. Looking forward to the next weeks! Well done, AppSync team!
- nslog 9y agoThe AWS AppSync pages are live now: https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/ https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/
- MentallyRetired 9y agoGraph.cool has been great for me, and good customer service. That said, and I'll just say it... GraphQL as a standard is total garbage. What was wrong with existing transport formats (JSON)? Why must I now learn YET ANOTHER query language and schema definition format, much less one with the frailty of a toothpick house with no glue?
- dboreham 9y agoWhat query language and schema definition format are you using now?
- LeicaLatte 9y agoVery timely product from Amazon. AppSync comes with subscriptions and looks quite useful. Do any of the other GraphQL startups out there offer subscriptions?
- nikolasburk 9y agoGraphcool does have full subscription suppport!
- LeicaLatte 9y agoFantastic. Thanks!
- sdeff 9y agoWill AppSync also enable offline-first mobile apps? For example enable users to use the app without the need to transfer data to AWS (create/modify data without an internet connection on the first app start). And only connect to AWS if the user wants to sign in to backup/sync the app data with AWS.