AWS Amplify vs AWS CLI: What are the differences?

Introduction AWS Amplify and AWS CLI are both powerful tools provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for developers to interact with their AWS resources. While both tools serve different purposes, there are key differences that set them apart.

1. Ease of Use and Deployment: AWS Amplify is a development platform that provides a higher level of abstraction, allowing developers to easily build, deploy, and manage cloud-based applications. It abstracts away much of the underlying infrastructure details, making it easier for developers to focus on the application logic. On the other hand, AWS CLI is a command-line interface that requires more technical knowledge and manual configuration for deploying applications and managing AWS resources.

2. Flexibility and Control: AWS CLI provides more fine-grained control and flexibility compared to AWS Amplify. With AWS CLI, developers have access to a wide range of commands to interact with various AWS services and resources, allowing for more customized and complex configurations. AWS Amplify, on the other hand, provides a simplified and opinionated workflow, which may limit the ability to customize certain aspects of the application.

3. Development Workflow: AWS Amplify offers a streamlined development workflow, providing a set of tools and features that help automate common development tasks such as authentication, data storage, and backend APIs. It integrates with popular frontend frameworks and provides easy-to-use CLI commands for managing the application lifecycle. AWS CLI, on the other hand, requires manual configuration and scripting to perform similar tasks, making it more suitable for advanced developers who prefer more control and customization.

4. Community Support and Ecosystem: AWS Amplify has a growing and active community of developers, with a strong ecosystem of plugins, extensions, and integrations. It provides a rich set of documentation, resources, and sample projects to help developers get started quickly. AWS CLI also has a large user base and community support, with extensive documentation and examples available, but it may not have the same level of tailored resources specifically for application development.

5. Resource Management and Deployment Automation: AWS Amplify provides a higher level of abstraction for managing AWS resources and automates the deployment process. It offers a simple configuration file (amplify.yml) that defines the application environment and resources, which can be version controlled and easily shared among team members. AWS CLI, on the other hand, requires more manual configuration and scripting for managing resources and deploying applications, making it more suitable for custom or intricate deployment scenarios.

6. Cloud Provider Agnostic: AWS Amplify is designed specifically for AWS cloud services and does not support other cloud providers. It offers a tightly integrated experience with AWS services and leverages AWS-specific features. On the other hand, AWS CLI is a more general-purpose tool that can be used to interact with multiple cloud providers, making it a more versatile choice for developers working on multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments.

In Summary, AWS Amplify provides an easy-to-use, opinionated workflow for developing and deploying applications on AWS, while AWS CLI offers more flexibility and control for advanced developers.