Amplication

With Yuval Hazaz, CEO

2023-05-02

What is Amplication? Why did you build it?

Amplication is an open source platform that allows developers to automatically generate all the repetitive and boilerplate part of their backend code in order to be able to focus on writing the business logic, creating the actual value of an application, easily scaffolding an API with authentication, authorization, login, tracing, and database connectivity.

Everything that can be automated is automated and the developer gets all their code from Amplication with a Git pull request. The developer has full ownership of the code. This allows them to build scaffolding for an entire fully functional backend with all the data models, crowd operation, and even a client application in minutes. The developer can always go back to Amplication, make changes on the data schema, add more integration, change any type of implementation on settings, and get a new pull request with the delta, push the code to Git, continue working on that code, customize the code and switch between custom code for business value or anything else.

The code that we generate is Node.js domain, so we generate a Node application for their backend based on NestJS as a web framework. We have a plugin system that allows either third parties or the open source community to create plugins that will impact the code generation process. Instead of getting something that is very rigid or very opinionated, anyone could create a plugin that impacts the code generation process, adding a new folder structure, formatting integration, type of database and so on – this is Amplication in a nutshell.

As for why we built it, I've been a developer almost since I was born. I have been working as an engineer or engineering manager for all my career and was dealing a lot with scaffolding, creating services, creating applications, onboarding new developers, and delivering knowledge, best practices, and know-hows on how to build services. Eventually I decided to go and build Amplication as an open source project, and the rest is history. It has been three years since we started building it, one year since we got funded. Now we have almost 10,000 GitHub stars and a community of thousands of developers, many thousands of signups and developers using the product around the world.