AWS Amplify vs AWS Lambda: differences of both tools

The services that are included in AWS vary in range and functions, in addition to being ideal to help any company in its technological projects. Two of the most prominent right now are AWS Amplify and AWS Lambda.

AWS Amplify is an AWS service focused on creating and managing the backend side of a web application or a mobile application, while AWS Lambda, for its part, is responsible for providing the user with a serverless cloud platform that executes codes responding to a predefined event.

Let's see in detail what each of these services offers.

Uses and features of AWS Lambda

According to the definition they give on their official website “AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying computing resources for you. These events can include status changes or an update, such as a user placing an item in a shopping cart on an e-commerce website. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic or build your own back-end services that work with AWS scale, performance, and security.”

The main feature of AWS Lambda is the ability to automatically execute code in response to various events, including: HTTP requests through Amazon API Gateway, object modifications in Amazon Simple Storage, state transitions in AWS Step Functions, among others.

The code runs on a computing infrastructure that is also capable of managing your computing resources, including server maintenance, operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning, and autoscaling. Just provide the code and you're done.

Main features of AWS Lambda

Among its main functions and features, is that AWS Lambda can maintain event integrations or manage execution times without problems. Also:

• Run code without provisioning or managing servers.
• Create workload-based cluster scaling logic.
• With Lambda, you can run code for almost any type of back-end application or service without having to do any administration.
• You can write Lambda functions in Node.js, Python, Go, Java, and more.

Uses and features of AWS Amplify

"AWS Amplify consists of a set of tools (open source framework, visual development environment, console) and services (web application and static website hosting) to accelerate the development of mobile and web applications on AWS" is how they define this technology on their official website.

Also known for being open source, AWS Amplify has a variety of libraries, components for working with the user interface, and a command-line backend that can be integrated with Android and iOS apps, web apps, and React Native.

In addition to this, the Amplify framework makes use of a suite of AWS cloud services to offer other functionality to its users, including offline data, analytics, authentication, push notifications, and large-scale automation bots.

In the official documentation they explain the uses of AWS Amplify “With the Amplify libraries, you can quickly add features like offline data, multi-factor authentication, analytics, and more to your application with just a few lines of code. You can configure underlying cloud services such as AWS AppSync, Amazon Cognito, Amazon Pinpoint, AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, or Amazon Lex directly from the Amplify CLI or Amplify Studio with intuitive guided workflows, minimizing the time required to configure and manage its backend services”.

Key differences between AWS Amplify and AWS Lambda

• Description: Amplify is defined as a set of tools and services capable of quickly building web and mobile applications on AWS, while Lambda is a serverless computing service that allows you to run code in the cloud.
• Creation: Amplify was created in 2017, while Lambda has been on the market longer: since 2014.
• Cost: both tools have a payment model according to what is used. They also offer a free layer.
• Extra features: AWS Amplify works for authentication, data storage, hosting management, and geolocation. AWS Lambda offers serverless compute, customizable logic, auto-scaling, self-managing database connectors.

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