Book Image

Building Serverless Web Applications

By : Diego Zanon
Book Image

Building Serverless Web Applications

By: Diego Zanon

Overview of this book

This book will equip you with the knowledge needed to build your own serverless apps by showing you how to set up different services while making your application scalable, highly available, and efficient. We begin by giving you an idea of what it means to go serverless, exploring the pros and cons of the serverless model and its use cases. Next, you will be introduced to the AWS services that will be used throughout the book, how to estimate costs, and how to set up and use the Serverless Framework. From here, you will start to build an entire serverless project of an online store, beginning with a React SPA frontend hosted on AWS followed by a serverless backend with API Gateway and Lambda functions. You will also learn to access data from a SimpleDB database, secure the application with authentication and authorization, and implement serverless notifications for browsers using AWS IoT. This book will describe how to monitor the performance, efficiency, and errors of your apps and conclude by teaching you how to test and deploy your applications.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Setting up CloudFront


CloudFront serves static files as a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Having file copies next to your users reduces latency and improves your perceived website speed. Another feature, which we will discuss later, is support for HTTPS requests.

In the next sections, we will create a CloudFront distribution and adjust the Route 53 settings to use CloudFront instead of the S3 bucket.

Creating a distribution

A CloudFront distribution is what makes it possible to associate a DNS configuration (Route 53) with CloudFront to distribute static content. A distribution needs an origin server to know where the files are stored. In our case, the origin will be the S3 bucket that was previously configured.

Let's perform the following steps to create a CloudFront distribution:

  1. Browse the CloudFront Management Console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudfront and click on Create Distribution:
  1. The next step is to select the distribution type. For our website, select Get Started under the...