AWS AppSync and Aurora Serverless let you easily build a GraphQL powered BFF to decouple your Front-End Clients from the complex “Deep Back-End”
What?
A BFF or Back-End for Front-End Architecture or Pattern basically means that you have a dedicated Back-End for the soul purpose of serving your Front-End in the most efficient and focused way.
Why?
Especially in enterprise application you notice that the traditional Back-End is moving extremely slow. Usually because it has grown to a very fragile complexity. Connecting the Front-End to it is often done with very monolithic endpoints which are equally fragile and complex.
But times have changed and product management expects much more from Front-Ends now. They need to be modern, agile, fast iterations following customer feedback and user research. And with modern Front-End technologies like React or Flutter it is easy to achieve this.
The roadblock is the traditional Back-End. It usually takes a long time to evolve and often doesn’t match exactly what the Front-End actually demands. Which ends up in slow over-fetching and lots of unnecessary untangling of data on the Client. Which all leads to extremely slow, messy and painful Front-End development even with the most modern Front-End technologies.
So?
BFF to the rescue. Imagine having a Back-End that is dedicated and owned by the Front-End. The Front-End can evolve and dictate exactly what it needs in which shape and form from the Back-End at any time.
To achieve this the Back-End must be owned by the Front-End (developers). Whenever the Front-End changes and needs a changed response from the Back-End the Front-End developers can just change the Back-End without having to ask for permission or wait for anybody else.
How?
Here is my very opinionated way of achieving all of this.
GraphQL is the perfect query language to interface between Front-End and Back-End. It allows the Front-End to specify the exact structure of the data and interaction it expects from the Back-End if form of a flexible Schema.
Cognito is a serverless service that provides us with very flexible User Authentication and Management.
AppSync is a serverless service that provides us with highly scalable GraphQL Endpoints.
Aurora is a serverless SQL database that provides us with highly scalable Database Clusters.
Pulumi is a framework that lets you create your infrastructure as code. This allows us to completely* automate and reproduce our BFF infrastructure across multiple teams, features, products and stages with continues deployment and DevOps procedures in mind.
“Wait, that’s all on AWS” I hear you saying! And right you are, as I said this is very opinionated and I believe it is currently the only way to achieve this completely serverless and automated at an enterprise scale.
Details?
Let’s start of with creating our desired infrastructure as code.
If you haven’t already, please create a free AWS account as well as follow the Pulumi Getting Started Instructions and Pulumi AWS Setup Instructions.
Now create a new empty folder for your project, cd into it and create a new Pulumi project.
mkdir mybff
cd mybff
pulumi new aws-javascriptConfigure your project to use the right AWS region and profile by editing the mybff.dev.yaml file.
config:
aws:region: us-east-1
aws:profile: mybff-aws-profileAwesome, now we are ready to go and add our first bit of infrastructure to the index.js file.
Let’s start with some boilerplate which imports the necessary Pulumi dependencies.
Now we can add the Cognito infrastructure. This will give you a Cognito User and Identity Pool with the ability to sign in with Federated Identity Providers like Google or Facebook.
Let’s create the Aurora Serverless Database Cluster.
To create the AppSync GraphQL API let’s first add some functionality to the top of the index.js.
Notice that this will load the GraphQL Schema from a file called schema.graphql. So we have to create it.
We can add the first part of our AppSync resources now.
And now we actually have to run
pulumi upBecause unfortunately at the moment Terraform and therefore Pulumi do not know how to create AppSync DataSources that connect to Aurora Serverless. So we have to do this step manually once at this point.
- Go to your AWS RDS console for your Aurora Database
- Select your newly created Database Cluster and press Modify
- Under Network & Security you have to check the Data API checkbox
- Press Continue
- Choose Apply Immediately and press Modify Cluster
Now that we have enabled the Data API for your Database Cluster we can create an AppSync DataSource for it.
- Go to your AWS AppSync console for your GraphQL API
- Click your newly created GraphQL API to edit it
- Click on Data Sources and then on Create data source
- For Data source name enter graphQLDataSource_manual
- For Data source type select Relational database
- For Region choose us-east-1
- Select your newly created Database Cluster from the dropdown
- Select your newly created Secret from the dropdown
- Choose Existing role and select your newly created “graphQLDataSourceServiceRole” role from the dropdown
Now we can add the last bit that dynamically creates the Resolvers for the Schema.
This will create resolvers for the files it finds in the graphql/resolvers/ folder. This assumes that the filename for each resolver is Type.property.js. For example, to add a resolver for the listPets property on the Query type we create a file called Query.listPets.js in the graphql/resolvers/ folder.
Now we can run
pulumi upagain and this will create the resolver resource for us.
From now on everytime you want to create/update/delete an AppSync GraphQL Resolver you just have to create/update/delete the resolver files in the resolvers folder and run “pulumi up” again 🎉
Awesome, now what do we have achieved so far?
- A Cognito User and Identity Pool that manages your users and allows us to get credentials to access the AppSync GraphQL API.
- An Aurora Serverless Database Cluster that gives us a SQL database which only costs us money when there are actually users making requests and automatically scales to “infinity”.
- A SigV4 protected, flexible GraphQL API which lets us evolve our schema and add new resolvers fully managed as part of our infrastructure code.
Why is this awesome?
- Our BFF is completely* automated using infrastructure as code.
- It can be deployed even into the most complex enterprise environments with the highest compliance restrictions thanks to the inbuilt compliance and scalability of AWS services.
- Being infrastructure as code gives DevOps total control and visibility when it comes to versioning, deployment and integration using Git branches and PRs.
- The BFF finally empowers the Front-End and UX to evolve fast without dependencies and clear boundaries.
- Clear boundaries also provide clean and clear integration points between the BFF and the “deep” Back-End allowing improved architecture and security.
- In an enterprise environment it allows your teams to own their features/products, to use Git branches for different stages and automatic continues deployment to development and test environments identically to the production environments.
- It improves the overall architecture, resilience and scalability of the whole product.
Caveats?
- For total automation without manual interference during the initial creation we need to wait until Terraform and Pulumi have support for AppSync DataSources to Aurora Serverless and the Aurora Serverless Data API to become generally available.
- Currently we can only do all this on AWS, but Terraform and Pulumi are cross cloud and we can reproduce this with other clouds once they have similar services available.
What are the alternatives?
The closest alternative would be to use AWS Amplify Framework. But I personally find it way too opinionated and creating way too much noise. Most importantly Amplify uses CloudFormation and this is an absolute no go for me (at the moment). CloudFormation takes away all your control and you are in Gods hands if anything goes wrong. So if you are dependent on CloudFormation you better be married to a high ranking AWS Account Manager and have an equally high ranking AWS Solution Architect as your mistress. Otherwise God help your poor soul. (CloudFormation experience deserves its own article or even an epic series of novels about war, pain and suffering).
As of May 2019 I am not aware of any other cloud solution that provides a managed GraphQL API that integrates with a serverless SQL Database. (Why this obsession with SQL? Because often NOSQL just doesn’t match your business data).
You can build your own solution by combining several different services from different providers, but this would be to messy and not realistic for enterprise solutions in my opinion.
You can build it yourself using containers, Kubernetes and other database solutions, but the amount of infrastructure you have to build and manage would be way more complex, fragile, insecure and expensive I would guess.
If you know something similar or even better to achieve this kind of BFF please leave a comment in the article. I am always keen to learn more.
Where to from here?
Now that we’ve got our BFF, we can use the identity pool to create and manage users. Navigate to the hosted sign-in page:
https://your_domain/login?response_type=code&client_id=your_app_client_id&redirect_uri=your_callback_url
This will redirect with an authentication code grant that you can exchange for user credentials using the authorization_code grant type:
With the user token you can then get access credentials from the identity pool (https://cognito-identity.us-east-1.amazonaws.com) which will allow you to access the AppSync GraphQL API as well as any other SigV4 signed AWS Service.
You first get an identity pool identity using your user pool credentials:
fetch(cognitoIdentityPoolUrl, {
method: 'POST',
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/x-amz-json-1.1',
'X-Amz-Target': 'AWSCognitoIdentityService.GetId',
},
body: JSON.stringify({
'IdentityPoolId': identityPoolId,
'Logins': {
[`cognito-idp.${region}.amazonaws.com/${userPoolId}`]: cognitoUserPoolTokens.id_token,
},
}),Then you can get access credentials:
fetch(cognitoIdentityPoolUrl, {
'method': 'POST',
'headers': {
'Content-Type': 'application/x-amz-json-1.1',
'X-Amz-Target': 'AWSCognitoIdentityService.GetCredentialsForIdentity',
},
'body': JSON.stringify({
IdentityId: cognitoIdentityPoolIdentityId,
'Logins': {
[`cognito-idp.${region}.amazonaws.com/${userPoolId}`]: cognitoUserPoolTokens.id_token,
},
}),And with those you can access any AWS Service by signing your request via SigV4.
Here is a little app to test the cognito bit of your BFF:
Another advantage of this over Amplify is, that you are not limited to the languages and frameworks that Amplify supports. For example I use this with Dart in my Flutter mobile apps as well and it works just great.
Any more questions?
Please don’t hesitate and post questions and improvements or alternatives to this in the comment section.
Enjoy your new BFF 😉
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