9 ms·

AWS Amplify Studio: Figma design to full-stack apps

167 points by revskill 5y ago

seanwilson 5y ago
How do you make responsive designs with this? E.g. cards should stack on mobile but shown in a grid on desktop?
node-bayarea 5y ago
Remember, many of these things that get released are usually just vaporware. They may become better 6 months or a year later, or, they may never see the light of day.
nautilus12 5y ago
AWS once again pretending to cozy up to open source when in reality they are shoddily getting their foot in the door with any possible monetization opportunities for it so no one can conceivable do the same. Open source communities should react violently to amazon adopting anything of theirs based on their previous track record.
henning 5y ago
This isn't going to work because UI mockups usually have subtle backend/business logic complexities implied by how the UI transitions in a way that can only be addressed with lots of meetings followed by custom code. Most people who try to use this and tools like it will be very pleased until the app doesn't work the way they were expecting. The sinking realization that they are fucked will not be pleasant.
mkoryak 5y ago
But does this thing support making the website be entirely written in SVG?!
petarb 5y ago
This seems to good to be true
bilalq 5y ago
In general, I haven't had good experiences with Amplify in the past. A lot of those frustrations are probably better directed at the Cognito and Pinpoint teams specifically. Amplify's been one of those things that worked amazing for demos and POCs, but was super frustrating to tune for actual production needs. One magical moment for me was the way it would spin up a copy of the entire stack (frontend and backend) for each pull request and tear it down on close, all with basically zero configuration needed. Of course, if you had OAuth or other things that required certain domains and whatnot, it broke, but the promise was there. However, this past month had a lot of interesting launches from the Amplify org. You can now use Amplify from CDK, override the settings on the resources it generates, and even tie it into a CDK pipeline. There's a streamlined GraphQL transformer so that you can just write a GraphQL schema and get a Rails-like experience that generates a full working app for it, with integrations on DynamoDB and OpenSearch. https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/blog/?awsf.blog-post-types-filter=*all&awsf.blog-learning-levels-filter=*all&awsf.blog-master-mobile=*all https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/blog/?awsf.blog-post-types-fi... There's a lot to like here. I don't know if any of this would live up to the potential, but at least you can see that AWS is investing pretty heavily in it. I think Amplify has a real future as an alternative universe way of working with AWS for app building. I could see this studio launch being a quick way to prototype/iterate/experiment with designs before giving feedback back to a design team.
vfulco2 5y ago
The decentralized nature of the platform's development causes the learning curve to be quite a bit steeper for noobs. There's also an awful lot of launches/examples without even a short explanation as to why someone might want to go this route vs. SAM or CDK. That's troublesome for someone who wants/needs a more holistic view of projects.
eunoia 5y ago
I was working heavily with amplify a couple years ago and to be honest it was an awful experience. Common use cases weren’t handled well, deployment failures were common, overall architecture was actually less coherent when using amplify than just the constituent AWS services directly, etc… It felt like a kitchen sink of functionality that no one was incentivized to actually make work well together. Have things improved?
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  I (at my workplace) use Amplify only for the SPA frontend which is a typical React app. Setting it up was bit of a challenge due to CORS issues, not something to do with Amplify as such. I like the nifty PR feature where it automatically creates an end point to test a patch. I've also setup auto-deploy on the master branch. So far no challenges. IMO if we don't use too many features of Amplify and use it as a pure frontend build + deploy + host then we could extract good value out of it. An alternative is Cloudfront + S3 in which case you need to maintain a deploy script. I'm fairly confident Amplify is in fact a wrapper over Route 53, Cloudfront and S3 plus a few lambda functions to take care of build+deploy.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- megalodon 5y ago
  It bothers me immensely that they redirect docs for services that work perfectly fine by themselves to amplify docs with a note that says something like "use amplify". Other than that, using AWS services directly is always a much better experience. In my opinion amplify is like a dumbed down version of that.
- antihero 5y ago
  The TypeScript types, the prebuilt components, and the code generated by the CLI are total garbage. It feels like the whole project is written by a junior. Every time it’s been faster to use Amazon-cognito-identity-js and roll my own forms instead of bashing my head against the wall trying to customise their weird needless shadow DOM implementation.
arpinum 5y ago
Amplify constantly under delivers. Features are built only enough to make a demo. Now they say they can go from design tool to working app, where dozens of companies have failed over the last 25 years. Call me skeptical.
- api 5y ago
  Low code tools are for making MVPs and prototypes. If something actually takes off you end up rewriting it with a real platform.
nicoburns 5y ago
I would like Figma themselves to have a go at something like this. Their auto-layout system is close enough to being flexbox that you can actually make decent responsive layout with it. I think a way to export that could be quite useful if done well. Especially for prototypes.
- chamsom 5y ago
  Figma's implementation uses WebGL so it might be difficult to pull off. I think there's some extra resources needed to act like flexbox, compared to actual flex box.
simse 5y ago
At what point is AWS too big? Or should I say, when did they become too big?
- jcun4128 5y ago
  It is crazy what they have, they have satellite ground station for example which is kinda neat but yeah... there's an AWS service for that.
  - allynjalford 5y ago
    They even have 4/5G private cell networks now.
    - jcun4128 5y ago
      This is a random tangent, I've seen people use 4G LTE networks for video piloted model airplanes, they were able to fly across an ocean between islands ha. It's 10 miles each way but yeah https://youtu.be/dxj8JwdQ7Lk?t=1253 https://youtu.be/dxj8JwdQ7Lk?t=1253
- Aeolun 5y ago
  They can’t really become too big when they still have two very viable competitors.
istjohn 5y ago
After getting burned by the dumpster fire that is Amazon Honeycode, I wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole.
- yanlezeiler 5y ago
  What's wrong with Honeycode ?
  - istjohn 5y ago
    1. There is no data export tool. The only way to pull data out is either to copy and paste from each and every table into Excel or Google Sheets and export from there to CSV or to roll your own custom export script using their poorly documented JS API. 2. Once you have more than 3,000 or so rows in a workbook, everything grinds to a crawl. It can literally take over a minute for any kind of data mutation in the administration user interface or in the app interface to be reflected in the display. This means that doing anything on the app becomes literally slower than if you were to do it with paper and pencil. And this is despite paying $20/month for the Plus tier, which purportedly allows 10,000 rows per workbook. 3. The project lacks polish and user-friendliness throughout. 4. It is buggy throughout, and developer updates have introduced new bugs multiple times. For example, recently the last record in a table started getting displayed in my app view even though it is excluded by the list filter in that view. 5. The bug reporting process is difficult to the point that I don't even bother anymore. 6. The first time you try to open an old workbook, it will error out. Presumably they are using serverless and the Lambda function is cold.
- amzn-throw 5y ago
  Amazon/AWS teams are so distributed and independent that it the quality of the output of one team very rarely reflects in any way on the quality of the output of another. This is almost always a good thing. There are of course centralizations and standardizations - the AWS SDK, Console UX, API guarantees, etc. But Honeycode has almost no relationship to the rest of AWS, technically, or organizationally.
  - 5y ago
polycaster 5y ago
Does someone know a comparable product from a different company?
- pat87 5y ago
  https://www.animaapp.com https://www.animaapp.com (YC S18)
- neom 5y ago
  https://www.noodl.net/ https://www.noodl.net/ maybe?
- matthewhager 5y ago
  https://clutch.io https://clutch.io
mauerbac 5y ago
Awesome!!
allynjalford 5y ago
I just use Amplify as a CI/CD pipeline tool for handling distribution, Etc. I don't use the actual framework in my applications.
deanCommie 5y ago
Better link: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mobile/aws-amplify-studio-figma-to-fullstack-react-app-with-minimal-programming/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mobile/aws-amplify-studio-figma...
allynjalford 5y ago
My biggest peeve is that these front-end no-code UI tools popping up aren't addressing web accessibility and making matters worst. I built a SaaS tool (https://tenably.app https://tenably.app) to handle the automatic remediation of web accessibility issues currently focused on headless e-commerce platforms. With Shopify being the current offering with plans to address more platforms. Maybe I should look at offering API's to address the needs of these no-code platforms so they have a way of solving the issues while building.
- nelblu 5y ago
  Where I work, the UXD teams are so deep into their Apple ecosystem bubble they don't even try things out on windows machines, so forget users with special needs they don't give a damn about the significant majority of our users who use windows machines.
GHJ7 5y ago
I'd definitely caution people away from Amplify. I use it for small projects -- one offs where I don't particularly care about performance, maintainability, or bundle size. For those sorts of low stakes use cases, it's probably fine. I'm not sure how much I'm saving over just using the CDK and a lighter weight set of libraries. Maybe nothing. But for a larger project, it would be an absolutely nightmare to use. Even on my small projects I'm constantly fighting it to play nice with modern JS infrastructure. Want to run Vite + Svelte + Amplify? Get ready for some headaches (or at the very least, tons of compiler warnings and huge bundle sizes.) The documentation is strongly, strongly geared towards the happy path experience, and if you aren't using React + the blessed service infra, you are going to hit sharp edges and lack of documentation immediately.
hellol-amda 5y ago
when it comes to any kind of development experience. most of the aws products are shit. their core services, lambda, sqs, s3, step function, dynamodb, kinesis coupled with rdms works really well. i don't even know, why do people bother with amplify and all that. just use the core services with cloud formation & sam. if you need some thing more, build out some thing of your own for use case on top of these services and just get on with it.
devastated_123 5y ago
I unfortunately have horrible experience with Amplify as well. Their official tutorial (something a long the line of "how to run a web app in hour") has several mistakes that cost me a whole day. It is very unprofessional that such an important document was not proofread properly.
- liquidcool 5y ago
  The Amplify team seems to be allergic to docs. They should double the size of their evangelist/tech writing team. I don't know when this was, but I'm just starting learning it now and the "Getting Started" tutorial seems to be 2+ revisions behind the current CLI, which is their main product. And UI components moved to v2 with a new doc site, but all the main docs/tutorials still refer to v1. There are breaking changes. I'd also expect to pull up docs on any class or function in my IDE (IntelliJ), but there is nothing for Amplify. Just type definitions, no explanations. Really rough developer experience.
braveheart96 5y ago
We've been using Amplify for a while and generally working around issues. Just out of interest, what stack would you use instead of Amplify? Things we would specifically miss: - integration with Cognito and Authentication - schema to DyamoDB generation (tables, indexes etc) - generation of CloudFront templates - generation of AppSync resolvers Also curious about using SAM / serverless framework vs Amplify functions.

167 points by revskill 5y ago

How do you make responsive designs with this? E.g. cards should stack on mobile but shown in a grid on desktop?

Remember, many of these things that get released are usually just vaporware. They may become better 6 months or a year later, or, they may never see the light of day.

nautilus12 5y ago

AWS once again pretending to cozy up to open source when in reality they are shoddily getting their foot in the door with any possible monetization opportunities for it so no one can conceivable do the same. Open source communities should react violently to amazon adopting anything of theirs based on their previous track record.

henning 5y ago

This isn't going to work because UI mockups usually have subtle backend/business logic complexities implied by how the UI transitions in a way that can only be addressed with lots of meetings followed by custom code. Most people who try to use this and tools like it will be very pleased until the app doesn't work the way they were expecting. The sinking realization that they are fucked will not be pleasant.

mkoryak 5y ago

But does this thing support making the website be entirely written in SVG?!

petarb 5y ago

This seems to good to be true

bilalq 5y ago

In general, I haven't had good experiences with Amplify in the past. A lot of those frustrations are probably better directed at the Cognito and Pinpoint teams specifically. Amplify's been one of those things that worked amazing for demos and POCs, but was super frustrating to tune for actual production needs. One magical moment for me was the way it would spin up a copy of the entire stack (frontend and backend) for each pull request and tear it down on close, all with basically zero configuration needed. Of course, if you had OAuth or other things that required certain domains and whatnot, it broke, but the promise was there. However, this past month had a lot of interesting launches from the Amplify org. You can now use Amplify from CDK, override the settings on the resources it generates, and even tie it into a CDK pipeline. There's a streamlined GraphQL transformer so that you can just write a GraphQL schema and get a Rails-like experience that generates a full working app for it, with integrations on DynamoDB and OpenSearch. https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/blog/?awsf.blog-post-types-filter=*all&awsf.blog-learning-levels-filter=*all&awsf.blog-master-mobile=*all https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/blog/?awsf.blog-post-types-fi... There's a lot to like here. I don't know if any of this would live up to the potential, but at least you can see that AWS is investing pretty heavily in it. I think Amplify has a real future as an alternative universe way of working with AWS for app building. I could see this studio launch being a quick way to prototype/iterate/experiment with designs before giving feedback back to a design team.

vfulco2 5y ago

The decentralized nature of the platform's development causes the learning curve to be quite a bit steeper for noobs. There's also an awful lot of launches/examples without even a short explanation as to why someone might want to go this route vs. SAM or CDK. That's troublesome for someone who wants/needs a more holistic view of projects.

eunoia 5y ago

I was working heavily with amplify a couple years ago and to be honest it was an awful experience. Common use cases weren’t handled well, deployment failures were common, overall architecture was actually less coherent when using amplify than just the constituent AWS services directly, etc… It felt like a kitchen sink of functionality that no one was incentivized to actually make work well together. Have things improved?

vishnugupta 5y ago
I (at my workplace) use Amplify only for the SPA frontend which is a typical React app. Setting it up was bit of a challenge due to CORS issues, not something to do with Amplify as such. I like the nifty PR feature where it automatically creates an end point to test a patch. I've also setup auto-deploy on the master branch. So far no challenges. IMO if we don't use too many features of Amplify and use it as a pure frontend build + deploy + host then we could extract good value out of it. An alternative is Cloudfront + S3 in which case you need to maintain a deploy script. I'm fairly confident Amplify is in fact a wrapper over Route 53, Cloudfront and S3 plus a few lambda functions to take care of build+deploy.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
megalodon 5y ago
It bothers me immensely that they redirect docs for services that work perfectly fine by themselves to amplify docs with a note that says something like "use amplify". Other than that, using AWS services directly is always a much better experience. In my opinion amplify is like a dumbed down version of that.
antihero 5y ago
The TypeScript types, the prebuilt components, and the code generated by the CLI are total garbage. It feels like the whole project is written by a junior. Every time it’s been faster to use Amazon-cognito-identity-js and roll my own forms instead of bashing my head against the wall trying to customise their weird needless shadow DOM implementation.

arpinum 5y ago

Amplify constantly under delivers. Features are built only enough to make a demo. Now they say they can go from design tool to working app, where dozens of companies have failed over the last 25 years. Call me skeptical.

api 5y ago
Low code tools are for making MVPs and prototypes. If something actually takes off you end up rewriting it with a real platform.

nicoburns 5y ago

I would like Figma themselves to have a go at something like this. Their auto-layout system is close enough to being flexbox that you can actually make decent responsive layout with it. I think a way to export that could be quite useful if done well. Especially for prototypes.

chamsom 5y ago
Figma's implementation uses WebGL so it might be difficult to pull off. I think there's some extra resources needed to act like flexbox, compared to actual flex box.

simse 5y ago

At what point is AWS too big? Or should I say, when did they become too big?

jcun4128 5y ago
It is crazy what they have, they have satellite ground station for example which is kinda neat but yeah... there's an AWS service for that.
- allynjalford 5y ago
  They even have 4/5G private cell networks now.
  - jcun4128 5y ago
    This is a random tangent, I've seen people use 4G LTE networks for video piloted model airplanes, they were able to fly across an ocean between islands ha. It's 10 miles each way but yeah https://youtu.be/dxj8JwdQ7Lk?t=1253 https://youtu.be/dxj8JwdQ7Lk?t=1253
Aeolun 5y ago
They can’t really become too big when they still have two very viable competitors.

istjohn 5y ago

After getting burned by the dumpster fire that is Amazon Honeycode, I wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole.

yanlezeiler 5y ago
What's wrong with Honeycode ?
- istjohn 5y ago
  1. There is no data export tool. The only way to pull data out is either to copy and paste from each and every table into Excel or Google Sheets and export from there to CSV or to roll your own custom export script using their poorly documented JS API. 2. Once you have more than 3,000 or so rows in a workbook, everything grinds to a crawl. It can literally take over a minute for any kind of data mutation in the administration user interface or in the app interface to be reflected in the display. This means that doing anything on the app becomes literally slower than if you were to do it with paper and pencil. And this is despite paying $20/month for the Plus tier, which purportedly allows 10,000 rows per workbook. 3. The project lacks polish and user-friendliness throughout. 4. It is buggy throughout, and developer updates have introduced new bugs multiple times. For example, recently the last record in a table started getting displayed in my app view even though it is excluded by the list filter in that view. 5. The bug reporting process is difficult to the point that I don't even bother anymore. 6. The first time you try to open an old workbook, it will error out. Presumably they are using serverless and the Lambda function is cold.
amzn-throw 5y ago
Amazon/AWS teams are so distributed and independent that it the quality of the output of one team very rarely reflects in any way on the quality of the output of another. This is almost always a good thing. There are of course centralizations and standardizations - the AWS SDK, Console UX, API guarantees, etc. But Honeycode has almost no relationship to the rest of AWS, technically, or organizationally.
- 5y ago

polycaster 5y ago

Does someone know a comparable product from a different company?

pat87 5y ago
https://www.animaapp.com https://www.animaapp.com (YC S18)
neom 5y ago
https://www.noodl.net/ https://www.noodl.net/ maybe?
matthewhager 5y ago
https://clutch.io https://clutch.io

mauerbac 5y ago

Awesome!!

allynjalford 5y ago

I just use Amplify as a CI/CD pipeline tool for handling distribution, Etc. I don't use the actual framework in my applications.

deanCommie 5y ago

Better link: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mobile/aws-amplify-studio-figma-to-fullstack-react-app-with-minimal-programming/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mobile/aws-amplify-studio-figma...

allynjalford 5y ago

My biggest peeve is that these front-end no-code UI tools popping up aren't addressing web accessibility and making matters worst. I built a SaaS tool (https://tenably.app https://tenably.app) to handle the automatic remediation of web accessibility issues currently focused on headless e-commerce platforms. With Shopify being the current offering with plans to address more platforms. Maybe I should look at offering API's to address the needs of these no-code platforms so they have a way of solving the issues while building.

nelblu 5y ago
Where I work, the UXD teams are so deep into their Apple ecosystem bubble they don't even try things out on windows machines, so forget users with special needs they don't give a damn about the significant majority of our users who use windows machines.

GHJ7 5y ago

I'd definitely caution people away from Amplify. I use it for small projects -- one offs where I don't particularly care about performance, maintainability, or bundle size. For those sorts of low stakes use cases, it's probably fine. I'm not sure how much I'm saving over just using the CDK and a lighter weight set of libraries. Maybe nothing. But for a larger project, it would be an absolutely nightmare to use. Even on my small projects I'm constantly fighting it to play nice with modern JS infrastructure. Want to run Vite + Svelte + Amplify? Get ready for some headaches (or at the very least, tons of compiler warnings and huge bundle sizes.) The documentation is strongly, strongly geared towards the happy path experience, and if you aren't using React + the blessed service infra, you are going to hit sharp edges and lack of documentation immediately.

hellol-amda 5y ago

when it comes to any kind of development experience. most of the aws products are shit. their core services, lambda, sqs, s3, step function, dynamodb, kinesis coupled with rdms works really well. i don't even know, why do people bother with amplify and all that. just use the core services with cloud formation & sam. if you need some thing more, build out some thing of your own for use case on top of these services and just get on with it.

devastated_123 5y ago

I unfortunately have horrible experience with Amplify as well. Their official tutorial (something a long the line of "how to run a web app in hour") has several mistakes that cost me a whole day. It is very unprofessional that such an important document was not proofread properly.

liquidcool 5y ago
The Amplify team seems to be allergic to docs. They should double the size of their evangelist/tech writing team. I don't know when this was, but I'm just starting learning it now and the "Getting Started" tutorial seems to be 2+ revisions behind the current CLI, which is their main product. And UI components moved to v2 with a new doc site, but all the main docs/tutorials still refer to v1. There are breaking changes. I'd also expect to pull up docs on any class or function in my IDE (IntelliJ), but there is nothing for Amplify. Just type definitions, no explanations. Really rough developer experience.

braveheart96 5y ago

We've been using Amplify for a while and generally working around issues. Just out of interest, what stack would you use instead of Amplify? Things we would specifically miss: - integration with Cognito and Authentication - schema to DyamoDB generation (tables, indexes etc) - generation of CloudFront templates - generation of AppSync resolvers Also curious about using SAM / serverless framework vs Amplify functions.