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

DynamoDB


DynamoDB is a fully managed, NoSQL database with high availability by default and that can be configured to scale automatically. The only reason that it can't be considered as a serverless database is due to its' pricing model. You must pay for provisioned resources even if no one is using your application.

However, DynamoDB is a great database, with many useful features, and AWS offers a generous permanent free tier. It is being extensively used in many serverless projects because it is cheap, easy to use and offers predictable performance. In this book, we are going to use DynamoDB as our main database. If you browse this chapters' code files, you will see the data layer of the serverless store implemented with SimpleDB and DynamoDB, but DynamoDB will be the default and the database where we will discuss here what features needs to be implemented for the serverless store.

Modeling the database

In DynamoDB, a table is a collection of items and each item is a collection of key-value...