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

Defining the project architecture


In this section, we will cover four different architectural approaches for serverless projects:

  • Nanoservices: This is where each functionality has its own Lambda function
  • Microservices: This is where each Lambda handles all HTTP verbs of a single resource
  • Monolith: This is where one single Lambda function handles all functionalities
  • Graph: This uses the GraphQL standard, which is an alternative to REST APIs

As we will see, each architectural approach has its pros and cons and there is no silver bullet. You need to weigh the benefits and choose what you think is the best for your specific use case. Let's see more about them.

Monolith versus Microservices

The first thing that we need to think about when choosing a serverless architecture is if the application will execute with just one Lambda function (Monolith or Graph) or if it will have multiple Lambdas. The number of Lambda functions represents how many deployment units it has.

A monolith is a self-contained application...