Learn AWS Lambda and see real world example with serverless

main documentation : https://serverless.com/

What is lambda

functions limited by time run on demand scaling is automated -> that’s why we call it “Serverless”

Pricing

• pay per request
• pay per compute time

AWS Lambda integrations

• API Gateway -> to build a REST API
• Kinesis -> processing data in streams
• DynamoDB -> Managed NoSQL database
• …

Example : Thumbnail creation

“Database Trigger-like” behavior for S3 New image in S3 -> trigger -> AWS Lambda function creates a thumbnail and push it to S3

/!\ the handler is the name of function that will be called in lambda The instructor only did a “hello world”.

The Serverless Framework

Aims to ease the pain of creating, deploying, managing and debugging lambda functions. Integrates with CI/CD tools. CloudFormation support (templates for deploying).

npm install -g serverless

IAM => Create a serverless-admin (new user). Programmatic access, and give administrator access. (not best practice though …)

serverless config credentials --provider aws --key XXX --secret YYY --profile serverless-admin

Hello world using the Serverless framework

serverless or sls => list of commands.

sls create --template aws-python --path hello-world-python

serverless.yml add

profile: serverless-admin
region: eu-west-3

sls deploy -v

the code is uploaded to s3, and then CloudFront is configured. IAM role is created for us.

Running a function from the command line

sls invoke -f hello -l

 Updating the function

change the print statement.

sls deploy function -f hello

=> how to integrate that with a proper CI/CD system ?

Fetching function logs

sls logs -f hello -t

enables to stream function logs as they happen !

 Remove the function

sls remove

add an IAM role statement to a function

iamRoleStatements:
  - Effect: "Allow"
    Action:
    - "lambda"
    Resource:
    - "*"

VPC for lambda functions

can launch a lambda in a VPC so that they can access EC2 instances or RDS instances. can specify securityGroupIds and subnetsId in the serverless.yml file.

Real world example : Service to create S3 image thumbnails

• S3 events
• plugins to deploy python dependencies (docker needed)

Triggering a function from an s3 event :

plugin : serverless-python-requirements it installs what’s written in requirements.txt file. Pillow => import PIL

Real world example : REST API with API Gateway and DynamoDB

Lambda functions are stateless, they don’t keep anything in memory, so they will write to DynamoDB.

package.json => like requirements.txt

environment :
  DYNAMODB_TABLE: ${self:service}-${opt:stage, self:provider.stage}

POST on /todos => call create function this is wired to the API gateway

under resources, you can specify the cloud formation template

response should always have a statusCode and a body.

 Personal investigation : creating a full stack app

If you want to build an app that can leverage that rest API that is written in Lambda, you can use aws-amplify : https://aws-amplify.github.io/docs/js/api.