What is AWS AppSync
AWS AppSync is a managed API service that you can use in your serverless backends. In this chapter we’ll go over it in detail:
If you’re already familiar with API Gateway, you may be wondering why you would need to learn yet another service. It all comes down to the protocol that you want to use: REST or GraphQL.
GraphQL was created by Facebook in 2012 to reduce the amount of network traffic required by their mobile app’s news feed. Facebook released GraphQL as an open-source project a few years later, and it has been slowly catching on. In 2016, GitHub converted their public API to GraphQL.
GraphQL, or graph query language, is an API protocol built on top of Representational State Transfer (REST). It enables you to specify what data will be in the response by filtering records or specifying which properties you need.
According to Smartbear’s State of the API report in 2020 only about 19% of responding organizations use GraphQL. The majority (at least 82%) of organizations use some form of REST.
