awedis for AWS Heroes

Posted on Mar 4

Building and Shipping Apps Faster with Kiro’s Agentic Power - (Let's Build 🏗️ Series)

#aws #kiro #cloud #serverless

What if you could go from a blank screen to a fully deployed serverless API — API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, and all — in under an hour? Kiro, AWS's agentic IDE, makes that possible. You describe what you want in plain English, and Kiro generates the spec, the infrastructure, and the application code.

In this article, I'll walk you through building a complete serverless CRUD API with Kiro and Terraform.

The main parts of this article:
1- About Kiro
2- Building a Serverless REST API with Kiro (API Gateway + Lambda + DynamoDB)
3- Key Takeaways

About

Kiro is an agentic development environment that makes it easy for developers to ship real engineering work with the help of AI agents. Kiro is our answer to the question “what would a development environment look like if it could take full advantage of AI?”

Kiro operates as a standalone IDE (a fork of VS Code), which makes the environment feel very familiar.

After downloading it from their website, I authenticated using my AWS Builder ID — the process was simple and straightforward.

Building a Serverless REST API with Kiro (API Gateway + Lambda + DynamoDB)

Prerequisites

AWS account with credentials configured
Node.js installed
Kiro IDE installed (https://kiro.dev)
Terraform installed (https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/install)

Step 1: Create a New Project in Kiro

Open Kiro IDE
Create a new project folder (e.g. kiro-serverless-api)
Open the project in Kiro

Step 2: Write a Spec (Kiro's Spec-Driven Development)

Open Kiro's spec panel
Describe what you want to build in natural language:

"Build a CRUD REST API for managing tasks. Each task has an id, title, description, status, and createdAt. Use API Gateway for HTTP endpoints, Lambda for handlers, and DynamoDB for storage. Use Terraform for infrastructure."

Kiro will generate a spec, design doc, and task list
Review and approve the generated plan

Step 3: Let Kiro Generate the Code

Kiro will create the project structure:

Walk through each task Kiro generates and approve the code

Step 4: Review the Generated Infrastructure (Terraform)

DynamoDB table with partition key (id)
Lambda functions for each CRUD operation (create, get, list, update, delete)
API Gateway REST API with routes mapped to Lambda functions
IAM roles granting Lambda access to DynamoDB

Step 5: Review the Generated Lambda Handlers

Here is an example of a snippet that represents a spec task checklist item within a Spec-Driven Workflow.

- [ ] 4.2 Create API Gateway methods
    - Define POST method on `/tasks` for task creation
    - Define GET method on `/tasks` for listing all tasks
    - Define GET method on `/tasks/{id}` for retrieving specific task
    - Define PUT method on `/tasks/{id}` for updating task
    - Define DELETE method on `/tasks/{id}` for deleting task
    - Set authorization to NONE for all methods
    - _Requirements: 7.1, 7.4_

Step 6: Install Dependencies

npm install

Step 7: Deploy to AWS

cd infra
terraform init
terraform plan (review what will be created)
terraform apply (confirm with "yes")
Note the API Gateway endpoint URL from the output

Step 8: Test the API

Make sure all endpoints are functioning as expected.

Step 9: Cleanup

cd infra && terraform destroy (confirm with "yes")

That’s it — in under one hour, you were able to build a fully functional serverless application by following a spec-driven workflow. This approach gives you the opportunity to review and validate each task individually, while allowing you to refine, adjust, or even change minor details as you go. 😎

Key Takeaways

Kiro's spec-driven approach: describe -> spec -> design -> tasks -> code
Kiro generates Terraform HCL files for AWS infrastructure
Lambda handlers and API routes are generated from the spec
Infrastructure and application code are created together
End result: a fully deployed serverless API with minimal manual coding

Happy coding 👨🏻‍💻

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