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

Chapter 7. Managing a Serverless Database

A serverless database is defined like any other serverless service: it needs to have high availability, and high scalability and, the pricing model must consider its real usage. Satisfying those conditions is particularly hard for databases since performance is a key feature. For a predictable and high performance, databases are usually configured in their own dedicated servers, but serverless requires a shared model to avoid charging the customer for 100% of the time the database is available. In serverless, we want to pay only when a request is done and not when the database is in an idle state.

Currently, only a few services have managed to bring the serverless model to databases. AWS offers just one service: SimpleDB, but it lacks many important features and is extremely limited. For other and better options, you can try FaunaDB, Google Firebase, or Google Cloud Datastore. To continue to use AWS services in this book, we are going to cover DynamoDB...