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

Security basics


One of the mantras of security experts is this: don't roll your own. It means you should never use in a production system any kind of crypto algorithm or security model that you developed by yourself. Always use solutions that have been highly used, tested, and recommended by trusted sources. Even experienced people may commit errors and expose a solution to attacks, especially in the cryptography field, which requires advanced math. However, when a proposed solution is analyzed and tested by a great number of specialists, errors are much less frequent.

In the security world, there is a term called security through obscurity. It is defined as a security model where the implementation mechanism is not publicly known, so there is a belief that it is secure because no one has prior information about the flaws it has. It can be indeed secure, but if used as the only form of protection, it is considered as a poor security practice. If a hacker is persistent enough, he or she can...