How To Get The Most Out Of the Cloud As A Front-End Developer

All right, so we're going to talk about cloud for front-end developers. I only have seven minutes, so, let's jump in. So, what cloud services are important to you as a front-end developer? And you're probably thinking right now, why would we even care about cloud services? But you probably already know that many of the services you guys are probably using are using these large cloud providers like AWS, like Azure, like GCP. So, I always wondered as a front-end developer, why don't we just go directly to the source? And that's an important question. And so, why don't we understand how this infrastructure works? How can we provision it? How can we use it? And as a front-end, I want to do this quickly and efficiently. And that's what the purpose of this talk is. It's just to give you a little bit of idea of how you may want to use the cloud, go directly to the source where a lot of companies are working with.

So, I'm a developer advocate. I work for AWS. You may see our booth out there. We're the Kiro booth. That is another product I'll talk about in a moment. But we have over 200 different services. Now, I'm going to just talk about a couple in this talk today. But if you're using any of the other ones, Cloudflare, anything like that, there is equivalence. So, I believe that even if you are using another service, this will be helpful for you as well. So, this first one is a bucket. Has anybody heard about S3? I see a lot of hands up. This is probably one of the most common services that we have. And I think this is a perfect one to start off with. If you are a front-end engineer and inspiring to learn more about full stack or full end-to-end development, then you can learn how to use S3. This is our object storage service that stores data's object within buckets, as you can read there. This is one of the first services that AWS released all the way back in 2006. And it's really the staple, I think, that really set off this cloud movement and how many other companies perceived this and started their own cloud services.

There's Lambda. This is like our serverless compute that you can use to offload any kind of calculations, anything you need for compute that you want to do. It's serverless. Obviously, there is still a server. But you don't have to worry about deploying a service. You don't have to worry about EC2 instances or VPNs or VPSs, anything like that.

This is all confined. You can deploy code to it and get information back. And then there's Cognito, which is our identity service. You can do authorization and authentication against this. A lot of people don't know we have that type of service. And I always like to point it out during talks. And it's perfect for front-end developers who want to be able to set up a sign-in, sign-out in their apps.

Of course, no talk here would be not complete without mentioning some sort of AI. And we have our own service called Amazon Bedrock. It's a way it has, I believe, over 100 different models now. We actually added in GPT recently from OpenAI. And so we're kind of a marketplace of different models. And then we have a lot of really built-in services that make it easy to use, like guardrails, ways you can use agents.

Now, as a front-end developer, I'm really excited about this. This is Kiro. This is a Gentic IDE that just recently went into what we call general availability yesterday. And we are excited about this. One thing that I get asked a lot is, like, why would I use this versus Cursor or anything else? We're really, really focused in on this spec-driven development, spec-driven development, this way of creating your apps in a way where you pre-plan it. And if you're interested in that, we have a booth. We can talk to you more about it. You can try it for free. Download it for free today. And it's really nice. We'd love to hear more feedback on it.

And then, Amplify is a service that... It's kind of like a global name that has a bunch of different services. We have Hosting, which is really important for front-end developers as it hosts websites like Next.js, Canstacks, and Astro sites. Utilizing Amplify Hosting, with additional libraries available, can be beneficial for front-end development.

If starting as a front-end developer with limited cloud knowledge, exploring the Cloud Development Kit in TypeScript can be a valuable entry point. The Cloud Development Kit, along with its wrapper Gen2, offers high-level abstractions for quick deployment of various services like Lambda functions and Cognito. These tools provide a seamless transition from learning to production, emphasizing TypeScript coding with IntelliSense support.

For JavaScript React developers, AWS offers dedicated libraries like AWS Amplify for front-end applications and AWS SDK for back-end services. These libraries enable easy connectivity to AWS services, ensuring efficient front-end development with a focus on small bundle sizes and backend service integration across the AWS ecosystem.

So I think I saw some people... Most people were raising your hands before that they used at least one of these different services. So how would I start? As a front-end developer, if I knew nothing about the cloud, I would jump into our Cloud Development Kit. There's similar services for Cloudflare, for GCP, Azure. But this is a TypeScript way of writing your code. You can easily deploy it, roll it back. It's great for testing. And also deploying to production as well. It can be great for learning and all the way to production. And it's just TypeScript. We've worked really hard with our IntelliSense and documentation for this. And this would be where I would start first.

There's also something called Gen2, which is a wrapper around our CDK, which is another level of abstraction, which helps you get started even quicker. So if you want to get that Lambda function up and running really quickly, if you want to get that Cognito service, use this. It just has these high-level primitives. And it'll set you up.

Now, we're all... I'm assuming here JavaScript React developers, assuming we are React Conference. What JavaScript libraries do you have? Well, a lot of people don't know, we actually have an AWS Amplify front-end library that helps you connect to AWS services, which is perfect for your front-end application. We worked really hard on that, making a very small bundle size. We also have AWS SDK, which is really great for the back-end, which connects to every single service. If you need to do some more complicated things, talk to Lambdas, SQS queues, SNSs. A lot of those acronyms you may not have heard of, but it connects to everything. And it's a pretty simple, type-safe TypeScript language. Many different, it has Python, JavaScript, a bunch of different languages it supports. Then there's something called Connected Components. These are little drop-in pieces of code that you can add to your React codebase that adds like an authenticator. So you can add in sign-in and sign-out. Sort of looks like this, you can just import it in from AWS Amplify. We also have a File Uploader, which is a way to just upload files to S3.

And we have a few more, I don't have time to go through them all, but it's just a simple component you can add to your front end. And you can start talking to these AWS services today. In this case, this would be S3.

And then, of course, I mentioned a little bit briefly about AWS Amplify. This is a hosting service. You can host your website in the console, and you are good to go there. So we support all the major frameworks.

Thank you for coming to listen to this talk. I put a QR code up here, so if you scan it, you can rate this talk, let me know how we're doing. Thanks.