Building Serverless Enterprise Applications Using AWS managed services to build web apps

Agenda Justification Application requirements AWS serverless architecture Frameworks and tooling Gotchas Questions

What’s the business case? Know why you are building in the cloud before you start Hint: It’s probably not to save money Some ideas Improve responsiveness to customer needs Centralize and automate resource management Document and version environment Support cyclic or shifting usage patterns (match supply with demand) Develop skillsets

AWS Application Models Lift-and-shift Take existing virtual machines and move them to cloud-hosted EC2 instances (rehost) Quickest and cheapest, but fewest cloud advantages Rearchitect Rebuild application from the ground up using managed services Most time consuming and expensive, but most cloud advantages

Requirements Basic CRUD operations Multi-user Scalable Create, read, update, delete Multi-user Scalable Secure (authentication and authorization) Use managed resources Align with AWS best practices

Annual Equipment Request App Used to manage the Library’s annual purchase and prioritization cycle 20 users with varied roles and permissions Create, list, update, delete records Old, ready for rework Big enough to be non trivial, small enough that we had a chance of success Built with PHP (Laravel), jQuery, SQL Server

AWS Architecture

AWS Architecture – S3 Cloud document storage Hosts static web resources Can be configured to host public websites HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images Supports CNAME aliases Supports .htaccess style configuration for URL rewrite and redirect Supports SSL for custom domain names Billed for storage and for transfer

AWS Architecture – API Gateway Acts as the ‘front door’ to the application Handles authorization and access control Exposes Lambda functions to your front-end application code Billed for API calls

AWS Architecture – Lambda Run code without servers Supports Node.js, Python, Java, C#, and Go. Can use existing libraries Upload functions, configure triggers Works closely with API gateway via proxy integration Business logic and data access code goes here Billed for compute cycles (function run time)

AWS Architecture – DynamoDB Document database in the cloud Non-relational (NoSQL) Fast and scalable Built in security, backup, restore, caching Billed for storage and for transfer

Supporting Cast Auth0 CloudFormation CloudWatch Serverless.com

Serverless Framework The ‘glue’ 3rd party service “A toolkit for deploying and operating serverless architectures” Cloud infrastructure as code Deployment tools Environment configuration Profiles IAM Roles CloudFormation

Demo

Gotchas CORS Lambda Proxy Integration response https://serverless.com/blog/cors-api-gateway-survival-guide/ Lambda Proxy Integration response Client-side authentication AWS Custom Authorizers and Auth0 JSON Web Tokens Example code issues Framework maturity

Links and Questions https://github.com/scottmetoyer/libapps-cloud https://serverless.com/ https://auth0.com/ https://github.com/serverless/examples