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Comment by shortj | Hacker News Reader

For anyone else that is looking at rolling your own static hosting like this on AWS specifically (including CloudFront cache invalidations and protected domains), I highly recommend checking out Amplify Console https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/console/. It's a little bit more feature-rich and avoids headaches like the article ran into. Closer to Netlify than it is to CloudFront + S3.

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Honestly after using Amplify to develop a new app, I have a hard time recommending it unless your use-case fits their design perfectly and will never grow beyond those bounds.

If you've already made any design decisions or need to do something differently than Amplify expects, it is a minor nightmare. It generates multiple local copies of templates for nested cloudformation stacks and doesn't really support manual editing. The basic Amplify CLI commands entirely abstract away what's actually happening with the AWS APIs. "Ejecting" takes loads of time to basically reverse-engineer the Amplify CLI, clean up the generated templates, and then create your own build process that you can tweak.

It would be much easier to recommend Amplify if it wasn't so far removed from the underlying AWS APIs and it provided an easy way to modify those API calls or templates instead of being stuck within its guard rails.

Amplify CLI and Amplify Console have nothing to do with one another. Confusing naming, I know.

Classic AWS. I have a SA Pro cert and I still couldn't reliably articulate the difference between Lightsail, SAM, and Amplify CLI. It feels like they keep adding to each without any apparent strategy. I didn't even know there was another product also branded "Amplify" separate from the CLI.

AWS really needs more centralized decision-making. It feels like individual product teams are allowed to go way off in the weeds without any frame of reference for whether their solutions make sense when plugged into the full suite.

The Amplify naming is a special kind of AWS classicality. Amplify, what a great Netlify like experience! Oh... not that one, you mean the CLI/Framework. Also pretty cool, we'll see how it plays out with the CDK. No? You mean the literal Amplify library that makes UI work easier. All of which can work together, but don't necessarily have to.

I can't complain too much, it's a bit of job assurance for folks like myself that specialize in only AWS. Exhausting keeping up to speed on everything though.

+1 on this. wanted very much to like amplify but after using it for a few small projects, decided it was not worth the trouble. it abstracted too much and was too opinioated for what i wanted to do.

the one use case i do like it for is hosting simple static sites (eg. jekyll based sites).

that being said, i do like the amplify javascript sdk, especially the auth library and react components: https://aws-amplify.github.io/docs/js/api

best part is that you can use the components without using the amplify service/console

Does Amplify Console support the multi-account usage pattern described here? That's the part responsible for most of the complexity + headaches in this setup.

Yep, and it does so pretty easily. You just connect Amplify Console projects in each of the two accounts to a particular branch (or branches if you want feature branches in dev) of your git repository.

multiple account support in amplify involves configuring amplify in each account to a particular branch. amplify doesn't support CI/CD types of deployment - instead, you would need to push to a 'dev' branch to triggers a dev build and then later push to a 'prod' branch to trigger a prod build. one reason we went with a central pipeline is to have a single account to manage all deployments as well as control what code gets to production.

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