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Take the Journey: Build Your First Serverless Web Application

I realized at a young age that I really liked writing those special statements that would control the computer and make it work in the manner in which I desired. This technique of controlling the computer and building things on the machine, I learned from my teachers was called writing code, and it fascinated me. Even now, what seems like centuries later, I still get the thrill of writing code, building cool solutions, and tackling all the associated challenges of this craft. It is no wonder then, that I am a huge fan of serverless computing and serverless architectures.

Serverless Computing allows me to do what I enjoy, which is write code, without having to provision and/or configure servers. Using the AWS Serverless Platform means that all the heavy lifting of server management is handled by AWS, allowing you to focus on building your application.

If you enjoy coding like I do and have yet to dive into building serverless applications, boy do I have some sensational news for you. You can build your own serverless web application with our new Serverless Web Application Guide, which provides step-by-step instructions for you to create and deploy your serverless web application on AWS.

 

The Serverless Web Application Guide is a hands-on tutorial that will assist you in building a fully scalable, serverless web application using the following AWS Services:

  • AWS Lambda: a managed service for serverless compute that allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers
  • Amazon S3: a managed service that provides simple, durable, scalable object storage
  • Amazon Cognito: a managed service that allows you to add user sign-up, and data synchronization to your application
  • Amazon API Gateway: a managed service which you can create, publish, and maintain secure APIs
  • Amazon DynamoDB: a fast and flexible NoSQL managed cloud database with support for various document and key-value storage models

The application you will build is a simple web application designed for a fictional transportation service. The application will enable users to register and login into the website to request rides from a very unique transportation fleet. You will accomplish this by using the aforementioned AWS services with the serverless application architecture shown in the diagram below.

 
The guide breaks up the each step to build your serverless web application into five separate modules.

 

  1. Static Web Hosting: Amazon S3 hosts static web resources including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image files that are loaded in the user’s browser.
  2. User Management: Amazon Cognito provides user management and authentication functions to secure the backend API.
  3. Serverless Backend: Amazon DynamoDB provides a persistence layer where data can be stored by the API’s Lambda function.
  4. RESTful APIs: JavaScript executed in the browser sends and receives data from a public backend API built using AWS Lambda and API Gateway.
  5. Resource Cleanup: All the resources created throughout the tutorial will be terminated.

To be successful in building the application, you must remember to complete each module in sequential order, as the modules are dependent on resources created in the previous one. Some of the guide’s modules provide CloudFormation templates to aid you in generating the necessary resources to build the application if you do not wish to create them manually.

 

Summary

Now that you know all about this fantastic new guide for building a serverless web application, you are ready to journey into the world of AWS serverless computing and have some fun writing the code to build the application. The guide is great for beginners and yet still has cool features that even seasoned serverless computing developers will enjoy building. And to top it off, you don’t have to worry about the cost. Each service used is eligible for the AWS Free Tier and is only estimated to cost less than $0.25 if you are outside of Free Tier usage limits.

Take the plunge today and dive into building serverless applications on the AWS serverless platform with this new and exciting Serverless Web Application Guide.

 

– Tara

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Tara Walker

Tara Walker

Tara was a Technical Evangelist for Amazon Web Services, dedicating her time to help developers build apps, games, and technical solutions in the AWS cloud. Tara worked on evangelizing AWS cloud computing architectures and development for various technologies like Mobile, Gaming, IoT, AI, Serverless just to name a few. Tara’s background is as a software engineer & developer who has worked on wide-ranging development platforms and systems while leveraging a myriad of development languages across her various technical and engineering roles. Over her 20+ year career, she has been employed by Microsoft, Turner Broadcasting/Time Warner, Georgia Pacific, and various other Fortune 500 companies. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Georgia State University, and currently working on her Master’s degree in Computer Science (MSCS) at Georgia Institute of Technology. Tara's passion is to continue spreading the “good news” to diverse audiences about a plethora of technologies, development languages, and frameworks with a focus and proficiency in: - Cloud computing and Serverless architectures - IoT (Internet of Things) development - Mobile, Game, and Web development - Artificial Intelligence services and frameworks - NUI (Natural User Interfaces) & Biometric Interface service frameworks - Cross-Platform development frameworks You can find Tara on Twitter at @taraw.