The benefits of going “Serverless” with your next web or mobile app are becoming too great to ignore. Especially if you’re a solo developer, small team, or startup. As a Full-Stack Developer, I enjoy configuring and maintaining the whole stack. But the back-end overhead is often costly in time and resources, sometimes you just want to launch something as quickly as possible! That’s where using Google’s Firebase or Amazon’s AppSync for your next project can help, so here’s a quick overview of both.
AWS AppSync
AWS AppSync is a fully managed GraphQL service with real-time data synchronization and offline capabilities. Use it to build native mobile and web apps with iOS, Android, JavaScript, and React Native. It’s great for building applications for that require collaboration, or social media, chat, dating, VR/AR apps.
Pros
- Easily create GraphQL schemas using the GUI
- Have an API running in minutes (GraphQL or REST)
- Code generation of GraphQL query’s, mutations, and subscriptions
Cons
- The learning curve is steep
- Documentation not always accurate due to fast paced changes
- AWS console is not intuitive
- AWS Amplify CLI toolchain not always reliable
Firebase
Firebase is a mobile app development platform that lets you build apps without managing infrastructure. It’s platform lets you test and grow your mobile apps with a variety of tools.
Pros
- Quickly build and prototype apps
- Short learning curve
- Lots of functionality, such as Machine learning, Predictions, and A/B testing
Cons
- Realtime Databases can’t handle complex data queries (Firestore is in beta, which solves this problem)
- It can get expensive