Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides many services to help customers architect a secure, agile, and scalable backend for their hybrid mobile apps. This eliminates the need for customers to develop and manage their own backend resources for each mobile app feature and can help reduce costs and increase productivity and innovation. But with so many options to fit almost any developer use case, it can be a challenge to choose the best option.

This webpage discusses best practices and technologies to help simplify the development of a backend for both hybrid and native mobile apps, and also introduces an AWS reference architecture for a RESTful mobile backend. The following sections assume basic knowledge of mobile app development, Amazon Cognito user pools, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles.

The following questions will help you decide if this solution is applicable to your use case:

• Does your app need a backend API to access backend resources?
• Does your app need to store user preferences or app state in a database?
• Does your app need authentication and authorization capabilities and related workflows such as user registration and sign-in?

If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, you’re in the right place.