This is the part where I wanted to throw my laptop out the window at least twice a week. When I initially read through the Cloud Challenge it was mentioned that this is where a lot of people get frustrated and quit. Building the backend became an endless rabbit hole of researching errors, poring over AWS documentation, piecing together and debugging code, and random screams of joy when I was able to get things work.
I struggled pushed through.
Visitor Counter
I needed to include a visitor counter that displays the number of visits to my site. As of this post, I JUST got this working. Javascript is not a language I knew. At all.
DynamoDB, API Gateway, and Lambda
In order for the visitor counter to retrieve and update its count, I needed to create a database table to store the data (DynamoDB). I also needed a way to increase the count in the database every time someone visited the site (Lambda), and most importantly for the site to be able to communicate with the database (API Gateway).
Full transparency, I've built everything manually up until now. If I didn't skip around while reading the instructions for the challenge, I would've realized that I should've built the infrastructure using an IaC tool (more on that later). I don't feel bad about it though, building the infrastructure manually reinforced my understanding of the different AWS services I've been leveraging in this challenge.
The next step was building a CI/CD pipeline.
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