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abalone

I.e. AWS’s take on Firebase, built on AWS primitives.

This has been out for a few months now. Any experiences with it?

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I'm leading development on a React Native app using AppSync.

So far it's amazing.

It leverages Apollo for offline/GraphQL capabilities and Apache VTL to bind resources.

It also integrates really nicely with AWS Amplify.

One thing that was a bit of an annoyance was access levels.

You can authenticate with the GraphQL api using a Key, IAM or Cognito JWT

Key is for development only.

IAM does not expose Cognito Groups to VTL

JWT requires an active session.

So we had to create a "fake" account for non-signed in access.

Use case being, a "guest" can read data from the API but only "admins" can write data to the API

I had the impression Cognito had this feature, but maybe I'm thinking of Auth0 here

To my knowledge Firebase doesn’t support graphql. I wish this meme about AppSync being AWS Firebase would die.

AppSync is very different from Firebase but not that different from the other graphql-as-a-service companies.

That’s an architectural difference. Firebase predates graphql. I think the idea is at a high level they both target the same type of customer and use case, i.e. rapid development. No?

That’s not the problem GraphQL was invented to solve AFAIK. Subscriptions were added to graphql later. As I understand it graphql was created to abstract various api endpoints and tie the nodes together with resolvers so that queries would be more efficient. Firebase is a real-time db. When you hit it you hit a single endpoint. That’s very different. I can’t imagine anyone well versed in graphql and Firebase and their histories conflating the two but yet my other comments to this are getting downvoted.

From the outside, it would appear that AppSync's main goal is to provide a realtime data/sync solution, and that their choice to use GraphQL was likely a design decision rather than the entire reason for AppSync's existence.

Of course, I say this as an outsider, not familiar with the details of the project, and having only read what's on the AppSync website. If AppSync really does exist solely to deliver GraphQL to the world, hopefully you can understand how this might not be apparent to other HN commentors.

Anyway just trying to explain how there could be confusion, after reading a bunch of the comments on here.

Yeah, that’s still just an architectural difference. Nobody is conflating graphql and Firebase. It’s AppSync and Firebase. AppSync gives you more flexibility with the back end thanks in part to graphql, which is cool, but for most people it’s in the same “rapid development” solution category as Firebase.

You can wire up DynomoDB and Lambda functions for the backend and expose them with a single API. This is so cool. It is lacking RDS though, a deal-breaker for me.

But you can use RDS from Lambda: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/vpc-rds.html

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