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

Monitoring the operation


The serverless concept is defined as running your code without worrying about the infrastructure that will be responsible for supporting it. This still holds true, but there are some DevOps tasks that may improve your application's efficiency and stability. Therefore, you should not confuse serverless with NoOps. You just don't need to worry that much about the infrastructure.

Since we are using AWS, we are going to use its monitoring tool: Amazon CloudWatch. There are some other paid and free tools that can also be used for this task, so feel free to compare them before selecting your own tool.

To use CloudWatch, open the Management Console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch, and let's see in the following subsections how we can monitor our Lambda functions:

Monitoring costs

Estimating costs in serverless is a difficult task, since it depends highly on usage. Also, deploying a new function may result in unexpected costs due to programming errors. For example...