Skip to content
PuglieseWeb Engineering HandbookSystemDox Pages

AWS Amplify

AWS Amplify is two things that are usually discussed as one: a hosting service for web applications, and a way of defining the AWS backend those applications talk to. Either can be used without the other.

Amplify Hosting

Section titled “Amplify Hosting”

Amplify Hosting builds and serves web applications from a Git repository. Connecting a repository gives a build pipeline that runs on every push, a CDN-backed deployment with managed TLS, and custom domain handling.

  • Static sites and single-page applications — React, Angular, Vue and the common static site generators.
  • Server-side rendering — Next.js applications are built and served with their server-side rendering intact rather than being exported as a static site.
  • Environments by branch — each branch is deployed separately, which gives production, staging and per-feature preview environments without additional configuration.

For a static site with no Amplify backend, Amplify Hosting competes with S3 and CloudFront configured directly. It trades some control for a working build pipeline and TLS out of the box.

Amplify Gen 2 — the current model

Section titled “Amplify Gen 2 — the current model”

Gen 2 defines the backend in TypeScript, in an amplify/ directory inside the application repository: amplify/auth/resource.ts declares authentication, amplify/data/resource.ts declares the data model, and so on. The tooling provisions the underlying AWS resources from those files, so the backend is reviewed, versioned and branched with the front-end code rather than configured separately.

Two consequences matter in practice:

  • Shared environments map one-to-one to Git branches. Production, staging and any other long-lived environment is a branch; a feature branch gets an ephemeral deployment for review.
  • Each developer gets a personal cloud sandbox. Local iteration deploys into an isolated set of resources rather than into a shared development account, which removes the usual contention over one shared backend.

The typical categories a Gen 2 backend declares are authentication, data (a GraphQL API over DynamoDB), file storage and functions.

Amplify Gen 1 — do not start here

Section titled “Amplify Gen 1 — do not start here”

Gen 1 is the older generation: the Amplify CLI, the amplify push workflow and Amplify Studio, the visual interface for building a backend and generating UI components. A great deal of tutorial material still teaches it.

Gen 1 has entered maintenance mode and reaches end of life on 1 May 2027. AWS’s position is that new projects should use Gen 2, and that Gen 1 receives only critical fixes until that date. Existing Gen 1 applications keep working until then; AWS publishes a migration guide and tooling for moving to Gen 2. A project started on Gen 1 today is a project that has to be migrated before it is finished.