3 AWS Services To Learn as a React Developer

To read more articles like this, visit my blog

The cloud is the future. More and more companies are migrating their infrastructure to the cloud, so developers who are familiar with cloud technologies are in high demand!

AWS is the most significant player in the cloud market. As such, it makes total sense to start with AWS.

But where do you start? AWS has over 170 services.

Today, I will tell you about the three most relevant services to React developers.

Main Ingredients

Any modern application has some basic features:

  • Storage

  • Database

  • Authentication

  • Hosting

In this article, we will see which AWS services can help us to implement these features. They should be the top priorities while learning AWS as a React developer.

1. S3 (Simple Storage Service)

According to the documentation:

“Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.”

Knowledge of S3 is necessary for a front-end developer because many companies nowadays use this cheap and easy-to-use service!

There are two prominent use cases for AWS S3.

Storage

Say you are building an e-commerce platform. You need to store a lot of images. Where do you store them?

Or maybe you have a small application where you work with very large JSON datasets that are not practical to store on any database.

AWS S3 is a perfect fit for these use cases. Some key advantages:

  • Cheaper

  • Secure

  • Highly available

Here is a resource for you to get started:

Hosting

Any single-page application (SPA) generates some static files after the build. That means you can access those files to access the website.

This is why AWS S3 is an excellent choice for you. You upload the files to the bucket and access the URL. It’s that simple. It also has some other advantages:

  • HTTPS by default

  • Easy integration with Route53

  • Easy support for CI/CD pipeline

  • Connecting to CDN is simple

These are the reasons why you should host your application on S3. Here is a resource to get you started:

https://javascript.plainenglish.io/how-to-upload-files-to-aws-s3-in-react-591e533d615e

This is why I think AWS S3 is the top service to learn as a React developer!

2. DynamoDB

According to the documentation:

“Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale.”

It’s very popular among companies for a few reasons:

  • Fast and easy to use

  • Flexible data structure

  • Highly scalable

  • Predictable performance

So, if you are a pure frontend developer but want to use some kind of database, DynamoDB is your best bet.

There is a good chance that you will need to use DynamoDB for some applications sometime in the future, so let’s learn it now!

https://betterprogramming.pub/how-to-use-aws-dynamodb-in-react-70b55ffff93e

3. Amplify

No matter what kind of application you are building, at some point, you will need to introduce authentication to it. If you are a frontend developer, then it’s very painful to set up a proper authentication backend by yourself.

That’s where services like Firebase come in. Although I believe Firebase is better, if you or your company only want to use AWS services, then AWS Amplify is the solution for you!

It takes away the hassle of setting up an authentication mechanism. Also, it has excellent support for React, so it’s a breeze to use it.

https://javascript.plainenglish.io/how-to-setup-aws-authentication-for-react-applications-8bbf03bb722

Conclusion

These are the three most relevant AWS services in terms of popularity and integration with React. Demand for a good React developer is very high. But if you know the cloud, this can make you an even more attractive hire for any company!

So what are you waiting for?

Have something to say? Get in touch with me via LinkedIn or Personal Website