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Transcript from the "AppSync Overview" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> Steve Kinney: So, we're gonna talk a little bit about, honestly, what might be the most interesting and arguably, crown jewel of the whole set of tools that we've seen today. AppSync originally was, we saw it as one of the options in Amplify, but I'm gonna treat it as slightly separate because it is a big enough topic in itself, and it's very cool.
[00:00:22] All right, so what is AppSync? We think about it as GraphQL as a service, which probably leads to the next question, which is what is GraphQL? And what is GraphQL as a service? We'll get there momentarily, I promise. But it's basically most things, a running theme of today is hey this thing that was kind of involved to server side arguably, it's one thing to do something server side.
[00:00:47] It's different to do it well server side, again, I have some certification but do you actually have email confirmations and forgot passwords and all this other stuff, right? GraphQL is really cool, but I kinda mentioned earlier, is that Scott Moss put out a whole workshop on of multiple workshops on GraphQL, so we're not gonna go to that level of depth.
[00:01:14] Spoiler alert, the next slide is enough GraphQL to be dangerous is the title of it. So, we'll kinda take a whirlwind tour of GraphQL and if you're, I am into this, go check out those courses. But what AppSync does is, it allows you to easily, most things that we've seen today, easily set up a server, for GraphQL that you can use on the client.
[00:01:33] And then Amplify provides you with some very basic tools for working with GraphQL. Now there are much more robust client side libraries, Apollo and Relay that all work. But we're gonna use just the very simple ones cuz this is not necessarily a workshop on GraphQL. This is a workshop on using Amazon's infrastructure to get up and running very quickly.
[00:01:55] Right? So, we're not gonna go all the way into this, but like the first time I saw GraphQL I was, sold. And when you actually see how easy it is to kind of get up and running with it, you're, sign me up. The first time I heard about AppSync I was, how can this even truly exist?
[00:02:09] And hopefully, you'll feel that way at the end. So, it can be used with existing back ends with AWS Lambda, in the same way we've been doing throughout the day, which is spinning up a dynamoDB database as we need it. I was thinking it takes that to a whole new level, but if you have existing back ends and when you wanna GraphQL over that, you can actually have them call Lambda functions which will then go ahead and talk to your back end as well.
[00:02:35] Obviously, that's slightly more complicated. Finally, it supports real time subscriptions out of the box, real time's in quotes cuz what is real time? Right, really, we can argue that, is anything on the internet truly real time? I'm not having that conversation right now, and it can be used off line with the appropriate clients side libraries so that's slightly out of scope for today.