DEV Community

AppSync: Basically GraphQL as a service

Raoul Meyer on February 02, 2019

Last year I learned about a new addition to the AWS lineup when I went to a conference. It's called AppSync, and it's basically a way to host a Gra...
Collapse
 
gusxavi profile image
Gustavo Castillo

I've been using AppSync with Lambda for a couple of months. At the beggining everything was beautiful. Once you start working with more users connected at same time, working with subscriptions you'll experience some troubles.

Subscriptions became really slow, only using 10 concurrent users connected.

Maybe with DynamoDB works better. I'm actually working with Aurora RDS.

Collapse
 
kayis profile image
K

I found the VTL stuff a bit hard to grasp, but it was really easy to set up with the Amplify-CLI. It allows to use GraphQL schema definitions to generate the velocity templates.

Collapse
 
raoulmeyer profile image
Raoul Meyer

I didn't know about Amplify, looks really useful. Thanks for sharing!

Collapse
 
danielblignaut profile image
danielblignaut

just a heads up,

  1. Appsync doesn't fully support graphQl spec
  2. It is using an outdated Graphql spec.

Example for point 1:

  1. You can't define custom scalars in your SDL

Examples for point 2:

  1. Can't use triple double quotes for comments
  2. Your types can't implement multiple interfaces

The pain of this makes it exceptionally difficult for our use case which is to not only resolve dynamoDB requests but we also have a microservice in lambda that uses serverless.com and apollo-server-lambda . We can't stitch this schema at the appsync level and use appsync as an overall gateway due to these issues.

Collapse
 
sjatkins profile image
Samantha Atkins

Why would I want a stack component that wags the rest of the dog so deeply? Because it is cheap? I don't care how cheap it is if it limits the rest of my choices this deeply.