Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lightbody | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious if anyone has used both Netlify and AWS Amplify and if they can do a quick compare and contrast? In some ways they seem very similar, but their messaging seems fairly different.

Disclaimer: I’m a JAMstack n00b and the last real web app I built was “old school” where we did crazy things like keep a session token around and server the HTML, CSS, and JS from a web app. As such, I may be slow on the uptake.

View on HN

Netlify is focused on delivering your frontend and has some light backend features added on (form submission, lambda functions, auth). But you can't run a dynamic application on just netlify, because there is no database. But you might not need a database, which I think is netlify's proposition.

AWS Amplify is focused on providing you a backend (with GraphQL) powered by AWS services (dynamoDB, lambda). You can run an entire dynamic application with just AWS amplify. They also provide frontend hosting now, but that part I haven't used (oops that was your core question sorry). It seems that the CLI tool just configures S3 and CloudFront for you. This is probably much less polished then using netlify.

Netlify has integration with FaunaDB for the database tier.

FaunaDB looks like a great product for a serverless/SPA type app but I don't see how they are integrated with netlify other than they fit together well?

FaunaDB support is built into Netlify Dev and was shown in the Netlify CEO’s keynote at the JAMstack conf. Netlify also has one-click deploy support for including FaunaDB with your applications. For instance this sample app can be deployed almost automatically: https://github.com/sw-yx/netlify-fauna-todo (Disclaimer, I work for Fauna and helped with the one-click deploy integration.)

i think AWS' GraphQL backend is a different service called AppSync? but they are often comarketed.

Oh oops yeah I had no idea these where different things. I have only used AppSync.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com