I was expecting the usual set of service and feature announcements in Wernel Vogels Thursday keynote, but instead he did focus on what is happening behind the scenes of AWS, especially EC2 Nitro architecture and S3. So instead of analyzing Werner’s keynote, I picked 2 announcements from Wednesday that didn’t make to keynotes but are worthy of attention because how these will simplify building APIs and distributed applications.

Amazon API Gateway HTTP APIs

Amazon API Gateway HTTP APIs will lower the barrier of entry when starting to build that next great service or application. It is now trivial to get started with HTTP proxy for lambda function(s);

% aws apigatewayv2 create-api \
    —-name MyAPIname \
    —-protocol-type HTTP \
    --target arn:aws:lambda:REGION:ACCOUNT_ID:function:FUNCTION

It is also nice that HTTP API has Serverless Application Model (SAM) support from day 1. And when your API start getting attention, pricing is up to 70% cheaper than generic API Gateway. Compatible API Gateway definitions (=HTTP and Lambda backends with OIDC/JWT based authorization) can be exported and re-imported as HTTP APIs.

Amplify DataStore

Amplify DataStore is queryable, on-device data store for web, IoT, and mobile developers using React Native, iOS and Android. Idea is that you don’t need to write separate code for offline and online scenarios. Working with distributed cross-user data is as simple as using local data. DataStore is available with the latest Amplify Javascript client, iOS and Android clients are in preview.

DataStore blog post and demo app is a good way to get your feet wet with DataStore and see how simple it can be to create applications using shared state between multiple online and offline clients.