Learn about the different ways companies are using Amplify
Five case studies to Amplify. From Startup to Corporation.
There is a lot of talk about AWS Amplify and it is an awesome product! But is it also suitable for production workloads and bigger companies? Let's have a look at five different case studies ranging from startups to huge companies to see how they are using AWS Amplify.
Let's go!
Busby
The first one is Busby. Busby is an app for outdoor activities and automatically detects user incidents. The company is completely bootstrapped and they scaled their app from an MVP to a fully-featured application with AWS Amplify. In the beginning, the founders thought about letting the app be built by a software agency but the prices to build it were way too high (>100k). They knew that it was feasible with a fully serverless approach and that is why they used AWS Amplify.
The tech-stack is a state-of-the-art serverless tech-stack:
- React-Native
- Cognito for Authentication
- DynamoDB as persistence layer
- AppSync as GraphQL API
- SNS for Notifications
They built the app by themselves with Amplify and used the newly introduced Admin-UI to quickly onboard new devs, show the backend in a visual way, and let them instantly contribute. The engineer was especially impressed by how great it is to manage the entire stack within Amplify. Also, the community enabled them with instant help and a lot of support.
The really astonishing part here is that it was possible to use the same technology stack for the MVP as well as for scaling the app without any problems. This is a huge benefit of Amplify.
All of US Financials
All of us financials is a finance platform for retail investors. They offer a web app and a mobile application. For All of US Financials time to market was critical. This is why they tried to abstract as much as possible and went with the Low-Code solution Amplify offers. Since they are working with financial data, security was a high priority. The shared responsibility principle suits perfectly because AWS takes care of all the hard security concerns and they just have to secure their bits. With Amplify it was possible to solely focus on the customer instead of building up infrastructure. With that approach, it was possible to build an iOS app within two months.
Orangetheory Fitness
Orangetheory Fitness is a really interesting story. They have about 1,400 gyms in the whole US. So when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world all of them were closed. They instantly started to do daily home workouts on YouTube or Instagram and gained a lot of traction. This is when they decided to make it their own system with Orangetheory Live. The user views are amazing. They have over 8 million views and over 1 million registered users.
The live streaming workouts were possible by using the Amplify Video & Chime SDK to stream the videos directly from the maker home to millions of users. The whole infrastructure runs serverless in several Lambda Functions.
Sky Italia
That is one I personally like a lot. Do you remember the times you want to watch a huge soccer match or the latest Game of Thrones episode? You buy that Sky ticket, get ready on the couch and all you can see is a huge wall of 4x4 pixels? With Sky Italia, these times are over.
Sky Italia had the goal of improving all live broadcasts of their sports events. Sky has more than 150 million page views per month which are really a lot. Another challenge Sky faces is that the company is huge and on the market for a long time. That means they have a legacy architecture. This makes the whole thing a bit more complex.
Sky Italia decided to deliver a better fan experience by pushing real-time updates during live broadcast events. The whole architecture was not only refactored but rebuild from the ground up.
So Sky needed to refactor literally everything. Since they wanted to build a great system they build a whole system new. For high page views and easy scaling, they use AppSync in combination with Amplify. This decreases the time for just propagating the data by factor 15! Normally it took a few minutes to publish many match scores, with AppSync this is done within milliseconds. Also without any on-premise server, the costs were reduced by 30%.
You can see the reference architecture here:
Credit Genie
Credit Genie is a finance platform for handling your personal credits and getting out of debt smoothly. They have the goal of using data and analytics to help borrowers escape the personal debt trap.
Amplify helped them to build the MVP quickly and scale it to a production-grade system within minutes.
The tech-stack mainly consist of:
- React & Tailwind
- AppSync as GraphQL API
- API Gateway as REST API
- DynamoDB as persistence
- CloudFront, S3 as static hosting -SQS
All provisioned and managed with Amplify.
Another major benefit is the great developer experience. People like working with Amplify and AppSync. With AppSync the main power goes to the frontend developer and he can choose which data to get. This is something a lot of developer love about GraphQL.
Here you can see the reference architecture:
Final Words
In this post, I showed you that not only startups and prototypes can use Amplify. It is amazing to see that you can build your prototype with the same tech stack as your production-grade system.
If you want to have more serverless, Amplify, and AWS tips follow my Twitter