DEV Community: Preeti Pragya

Serverless Services on AWS – Complete List with Explanation

Preeti Pragya — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 16:06:13 +0000

Do you love provisioning servers, managing them, scaling them and what not?

There are higher chances of you saying no to my above question !!!

Now imagine, I tell you –

Hey, here is your magic wand that will free you up from all the server management tasks and let you enjoy what you love doing with a nice cup of coffee(I love tea more by the way 😛 )

Excited?

Alright, Presenting Serverless!!!

You may read my previous post on What is Serverless Computing and Why it’s Awesome !!!

Serverless Computing has taken the cloud computing world to storm. Big companies like Netflix, AirBnb and Coca-Cola are using serverless to cater their compute needs on demand.

This makes me think that, serverless is next big thing in computing world. In other words, it’s the future of cloud computing.

What do you think?

Do let me know in the comment box 🙂

Serverless Services on AWS

When it comes to serverless architecture, AWS has the most number of services available with them.

Let’s discuss them one by one and see how can you use them.

AWS S3

Simple Storage Service or S3 is the simple, easy to use and cost effective object storage provided by AWS. It lets you store and retrieve any type and amount of data from anywhere in the world.

You create buckets in S3 and can store unlimited amount of data in a bucket.

You can use S3 for various use cases such as-

Static Website Hosting
Backup and Storage
Storage for Internet
Data Archival

Get Started: AWS S3

Suggested Read:

AWS Lambda

AWS lambda is the revolutionary serverless computing platform provided by Amazon. It provides you the capability to run code without provisioning or managing a server.(Exactly what you are looking for 😀 )

Provides pay as you go model. You only pay when your code is actually running and not for the idle time.
Runs in response to events such as a request to an API gateway endpoint or an image upload to S3 bucket etc.
Can be used for Back-end development for a serverless website or Real time data processing
Ideally it fits a lot of use cases

Lambda@Edge

AWS Lambda@Edge allows you to run Lambda functions at AWS Edge locations in response to Amazon CloudFront events to customize the response that CloudFront delivers.

It improves performance by running closer to your application users and reduces latency
You can use Lambda@Edge to change CloudFront request and response.

Get Started: AWS Lambda

Suggested Read:

API Gateway

API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.

Can handle hundreds of thousands of API calls. It also provides Authentication and authorization out of the box.

In the time of micro services and serverless, together with AWS Lambda, it’s a perfect fit for API development for your serverlss workload

Get Started: API Gateway

Suggested Read:

Set up API Gateway Custom domain name using CloudFormation

DynamoDB

AWS DynamoDB is a fully managed fast and flexible NoSQL database. It provides single digit millisecond latency at any scale.

You store key value and document data in DynamoDB.

DynamoDB provides both provisioned and on demand capacity mode to optimize the cost

Again it’s perfect database candidate for a serverless application and now it even supports transactions

Get Started: AWS DynamoDB

Suggested Read:

Create a DynamoDB table using CloudFormation

AWS SQS

Amazon SQS or Simple Queue Service is a fully managed message queue Service provided by AWS.

In the world of micro services architecture, Amazon SQS helps you decouple your application components so that they can work and fail independently

Frees you from managing your own message queuing system
You can send, receive and store messages between components
Increases the fault tolerance of your application.
You can share sensitive data between components using encryption
Scales efficiently as your application grows
Provides Standard as well as FIFO queue

Get Started: AWS SQS

Suggested Read:

Kinesis

Amazon kinesis is fully managed scalable and durable real time data streaming service. It lets to collect, process and analyze data in real time.

For example you can collect real time data such as audio, video, application log or IoT sensor data using it and react on those data in real time.

Enables you to ingest buffer and process real time data
You can analyze those data to provide insight in minutes
Can handle any amount of data from thousands of sources and that too at really low latency

Get Started: AWS Kinesis

SNS

SNS or simple notification service is fully managed messaging/notification service. It provides publisher/subscriber based many to many communication.

Publishers send message to an SNS topic and all the subscriber to the topic gets the message.

It can be used for-

Sending Emails, SMS and push notifications to mobile devices
Pushing messages to application endpoints like Kinesis Data Firehose delivery streams, Amazon SQS queues, HTTP(S) endpoints, and Lambda functions

Get Started: AWS SNS

Fargate

Amazon Fargate is a technology that lets you run serverless containers on Elastic Container Service(ECS) or Elastic Kubernetes Service(EKS).

When using Fargate launch type, you don’t have to provision and manage your servers.

You can simply specify the resources like vCPU and memory and pay for those resources.

Get Started: AWS Fargate

Athena

Athena is a managed query service by AWS that allows you to analyze unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data stored in Amazon S3 using SQS queries.

If you know SQL, it becomes really easy to analyze large datasets stored in S3. All you need is to point your data in s3 and define the schema and Tada you can start querying your data 🙂

It supports multiple file formats such as CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, and Parquet.

You can use Athena when you want to query data stored in S3

Get Started: AWS Athena

Step Functions

AWS Step Functions is a serverless orchestrator service by AWS that let’s you co-ordinate multiple AWS services like Lambda and others to help you quickly and efficiently develop business critical applications.

Basically it’s based on finite state machine and output of one step acts as input to other helping the workflow execute in order and as per exception.

It works perfect when your work includes predefined multiple steps. It co-ordinates the step well and provides error handling as well.

for example- you can use step functions to co-ordinate various steps of checkout for an e-commerce site.

You can checkout few more use-cases here.

Get Started: AWS Step Function

AppSync

AWS AppSync is a fully managed service which lets you develop GraphQL API quickly via the AWS CLI, console, Amplify CLI or CloudFormation.

It works by giving front-end developers the ability to query multiple databases, microservices, and APIs from a single GraphQL endpoint.

Does various heavy lifting like-

Connecting to various data sources like DynamoDB , Lambda etc.
Adds cache to improve performance
Supports real time updates by subscription
Client side data store to keep off-line clients in sync

Get Started: AWS App Sync

Event Bridge

Events are at the heart of communication when it comes to serverless applications.

Amazon EventBridge is a fully managed, serverless event bus that you can use to react to various event from-

Internal AWS infrastructure events
External SaaS provider events
Custom events
Let’s you easily create event driven architecture by connecting various event sources and routing it to a target like AWS Lambda or others.

Get Started: AWS EventBridge

Conclusion

That was my take on serverless services on AWS. I have got chance to work on almost all of them and I am pretty satisfied with the way they work.

To be honest, I love them all but being specific I really really love S3, DynamoDB and Lambda.

What’s your favorite by the way? Let’s blast the comment box with your comments. Trust me, I love reading them and they inspire me to write more. So please don’t wait and leave a comment for me.

This post was first published on CloudKatha. If you liked my work, please read more of it on CloudKatha.

AWS S3 CLI Commands Cheat Sheet: All You Need to Know

Preeti Pragya — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 13:35:04 +0000

AWS S3 is one of the most popular AWS service as of now. It is a highly available, durable and cost effective object storage in AWS cloud.

As you know, you can create and manage your S3 buckets using various tools like AWS console, CLI, CloudFormation etc. . However, nothing beats the ease of AWS CLI when it comes to managing your bucket.

Firing a CLI command is easy and quick.

In this post, we'll learn few most important S3 CLI commands that can help you while working with S3.

Suggested Read: 5 Ways to Create and Manage Resources on AWS

Prerequisite

Before you can use AWS CLI to manage your bucket, you need to install CLI in your machine and configure it using your credentials(access key/secret key).

Here is a step by step tutorial on how to do it - How to Install and Configure AWS CLI in your System

Note: If you don't use CLI on regular basis and just want to test few commands, there is a quicker option from AWS console itself. You can use AWS CloudShell which is shown in below screenshot. Click on that terminal icon on top menu of your AWS account and a ready to use terminal will open. This terminal already has CLI installed and is configured with your credentials.

Basic Overview of S3 and CLI with S3

Before getting started with CLI commands, we needs to know few basic terms of AWS S3.

Bucket: It's a top level container in which you store your objects
Objects: Any item that is stored in an S3 bucket
Prefix: Any folder that you have in your bucket

You use aws s3 CLI command to create and manage your s3 bucket and objects.

This is how the basic syntax looks like-

aws s3 <Command> [<Arg> ...]

You can have multiple arg like --region , --recursive , --profile etc.

commands or operations that you can use(copied from AWS documentation)

You can use cp, mv and rm on one object or all objects under a bucket or prefix by using --recursive option.

AWS S3 CLI Commands Cheat Sheet

Create a Bucket
List All The Bucket
List the Content of a Bucket
Copy Files to and from S3
Find Out Number of Objects and Total Size of a Bucket
Generate Pre-signed URL for an Object
Move File To or From S3 Bucket
Sync S3 Bucket with Another Bucket or Local Directory and Vice Versa
Delete a File from a Bucket
Delete All Files From a Bucket
Delete a Bucket

1. Create a Bucket

You use mb command to create a bucket. mb stands for make bucket.

Create a Bucket in Default Region

aws s3 mb s3://bucket-name

Above command creates a bucket in the default region configured in your CLI. If you want to create a bucket in a specific region , specify --region as shown below.

Create a Bucket In Specific Region

aws s3 mb s3://mybucket --region us-west-1

Example-

aws s3 mb s3://cloudkatha-cli-bucket

Note: Please note that, S3 bucket names are unique globally. So if you create a bucket with name 'abc', no body else can create the bucket with same name even in any other account. Therefore, always make sure to choose a unique name specific to your business like I added cloudkatha in my bucket name. And that way, it's unique to me.

Suggested Reading: This is why S3 bucket name is unique globally

2. List All The Bucket

s3 ls command lists all the buckets in your AWS account provided you have permissions to do so.

aws s3 ls

As you can see in below screenshot, it shows all the buckets in my account.

3. List the Content of a Bucket

Lists the content of a bucket. Ideally, it lists all the objects and prefixes inside the bucket.

aws s3 ls s3://bucket-name

For example-

aws s3 ls s3://demo-talk-with-anu

Note: Please note that, using ls commands by default lists only object within folder and not subfolders so if you want to list them all, use below command-

aws s3 ls s3://demo-talk-with-anu --recursive

As you noticed, we have added --recursive option to previous command.

4. Copy Files to and from S3

We use s3 cp command to copy one object or multiple to and from s3 bucket.

Copy a Single File from Local to S3

aws s3 cp localPath s3://bucket-name

For example -

aws s3 cp sample.txt s3://demo-talk-with-anu

Copy a Single File from S3 to Local

aws s3 cp s3://bucket-name/filename.txt ./

for example-

aws s3 cp s3://demo-talk-with-anu/sample.txt ./

Here sample.txt is copied to the current working directory.

Copy a Single File from S3 to S3

aws s3 cp s3://bucket-name/example s3://my-bucket/

Example-

aws s3 cp s3://demo-talk-with-anu/index.html s3://techtalk-with-preeti/

Copy Multiple Objects From One S3 Bucket to Another

Copies all objects in s3://bucket-name/example into another bucket.

aws s3 cp s3://bucket-name/example s3://my-bucket/

For example-

aws s3 cp s3://demo-talk-with-anu/website s3://techtalk-with-preeti/

Ideally, you can make your own combination of source and destination and copy objects to or from s3 bucket.

5. Find Out Number of Objects and Total Size of a Bucket

Finding out the total size of bucket is quite a useful command and needed at times. You can use s3 ls command with --recursive, --summarize and --human-readable options like shown below.

aws s3 ls s3://bucket-name --recursive --summarize --human-readable

For example-

aws s3 ls s3://demo-talk-with-anu --recursive --summarize --human-readable

As you can see above, total number of objects and total size are returned as well in a easy to read format.

6. Generate Pre-signed URL for an Object

You can use a presigned URL to grant access to an S3 object. You can also use --expires-in option to specify when presigned URL expires.

Default is 3600 seconds and Maximum is 604800 seconds.

aws s3 presign s3://bucket-name/filename.html

Example-

aws s3 presign s3://demo-talk-with-anu/index.html

Note: As you can notice in above screenshot, AMz-Expires = 3600 is shown as that's the default value. You can provide your own value like-

aws s3 presign s3://demo-talk-with-anu/index.html --expires-in 604800

7. Move File To or From S3 Bucket

You use s3 mv to move an object or file. s3 mv command moves a local file or S3 object to another location locally or in S3.

aws s3 mv source destination

Example-

aws s3 mv sample.txt s3://mybucket/test2.txt

Note: As expected from move, this commands moves the object/file to destination and removes/deletes it from source.

8. Sync S3 Bucket with Another Bucket or Local Directory and Vice Versa

You can sync a local folder with s3 , an s3 prefix with local folder or s3 folder to another s3 folder.

In the below syntax snippet you can see all the source destination combo is given.

  sync <LocalPath> <S3Uri> or <S3Uri> <LocalPath> or <S3Uri> <S3Uri>

For example-

aws s3 sync s3://mybucket .

using above command, all the content of mybucket is downloaded in current directory.

Syncs Two bucket mybucket1 and mybucket2

aws s3 sync s3://mybucket1 s3://mybucket2

9. Delete a File from a Bucket

You can delete a file from an s3 bucket using s3 rm command. This is how the syntax looks like-

aws s3 rm s3://bucket-name/filename

For example-

aws s3 rm s3://demo-talk-with-anu/index.html

10. Delete All Files From a Bucket

As we saw in previous example, we used s3 rm to delete a file. However, if you want to delete all the objects even present in subfolders, you can as usual use --recursive options.

aws s3 rm s3://mybucket --recursive

Example-

aws s3 rm s3://demo-talk-with-anu --recursive

11. Delete Bucket

You can use s3 rb command to delete a bucket. rb here stands for remove bucket.

Delete an Empty Bucket:

aws s3 rb s3://bucket-name

As you already know that if you try to delete an empty bucket, all goes well but if you try to delete a bucket which has some objects, above command is gonna fail.

If you want to delete a bucket with objects, use --force option. Using --force option in the command will first delete all the object and prefixes and then deletes the bucket.

Delete a Bucket with Objects

aws s3 rb s3://bucket-name --force

Example

aws s3 rb s3://demo-talk-with-anu --force

As you can see in above screenshot, first three delete operation is fired and then remove_bucket operation.

Conclusion

In this post, we learnt some of the most used AWS S3 CLI high level commands to manage bucket and objects.

We also learnt that, few commands like cp, mv and rm can be used on one object or all objects under a bucket or prefix by using --recursive option.

Apart from that, there are quite a few options that you can use like --region, --profile, --dryrun etc.

Hope the post was useful to you.

Feel free to check the official documentation for further details.

Resources

AWS CLI reference:

This post was originally published at my blog CloudKatha. You can check it out for more of my works.

Hope you enjoyed reading this post.

Nevertheless, Preeti Coded!

Preeti Pragya — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 17:36:54 +0000

Dear ladies, I hope you are doing great. First of all, wish you a very happy women's day. Keep shining, not just today but every coming day in your life.

Having said that, I really appreciate the effort of dev.to for celebrating all the incredible women out there via #shecoded.

This is the first time, I am participating in this and I am really excited to hear your story as well. So, go ahead and share your story of #shecoded :)

My #shecoded Journey

It's been almost 8 years since I started coding professionally in my first job and still thriving in 2022.

The journey was not an easy one and there has been ups and downs. However, one thing that stayed constant was, my attitude to not give up and to keep going no matter what.

I have worn many hats during this journey as developer, solutions architect, DevOps professional, content creator, speaker and a proud mother.

But, one thing that I absolutely love is coding. And, no matter which hat I am wearing, I still find time to code and get my dose of happiness.

Where It All Started?

Once upon a time in a remote village in India, I was having conversation with my childhood friend. She was telling me fascinating story of her city school where she got to learn computer and all the awesome things she was doing with that.

Something in me triggered that day and I wanted to go in computer world to know them inside out and play with them tirelessly. Back then very few people had even heard of computers in villages, forget about working with it. So I knew things are not gonna be easy. Years passed and I got into an engineering college in computer science and engineering.

Hence, my journey towards computer started officially ...

I still remember the day, I was in my C programming lab, looking here and there to see how this magic thing(computer) turns on(Well, it was the first time I touched a computer). I had no idea of what CPU is, and I will find a button somewhere there to turn it on.

I pressed the button after looking at how people were doing. To be honest, as the computer started, it literally ignited my fire to learn more about computers and how to make amazing things happen using it.

I wrote my first 'Hello World' with the help of my lab instructor and Preeti Coded !!! . Needless to say, I have never stopped coding ever since :)

My Recent Achievements

Recently, I have been selected as an AWS Community Builder by AWS. You can read more about this program here.

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Reached more than 120k readers last year on my blog https://cloudkatha.com where I create cloud computing related content.
Spoken at GDG Berlin event about Cloud Computing.
Expanded my horizon from only Java Development to Node and Python
Gave a tech talk on Cloud Computing With Anuradha on her YouTube channel.
Published a blog post on official website of AWS and it was well appreciated by AWS.

I would like to thank

My parents, who sent me to study outside village as first girl from there. The battle with respect to people, finance and everything else was not easy on them. However, they decided not to give-up on my dreams and made me who I am today.
My husband and in laws, who treated me equally in every aspect of life. They truly helped me in stepping up the little ladder of success I wanted for myself
Each and everyone who said "I can't do it just because I am a girl". Trust me, they have added the fuel to the fire.
All the amazing people who stood by me, supported me and encouraged to spread my wings and fly higher.
World Wide Web and all the amazing content creator who helps me every single in in solving problems and being there for me.

Shoutout to All the Amazing Women Out There

We are stronger than we think. Let's believe in ourselves and we'll conquer the world. Let's lift each other up and make this world a better place.

Once again, Happy International women's day to all of us 👸

Be you, because you are the best :)

Signing Off,
Preeti

How to Build a Node.js Serverless Application using AWS SAM

Preeti Pragya — Sat, 22 Jan 2022 18:46:30 +0000

Dear reader, I hope you are doing great. Few days ago, I wrote a post on “How to Run “Hello World” on AWS Lambda in 5 Minutes”.

If you are a beginner to AWS Lambda, I would request you to go through that post before proceeding with this one. Because, that post is gonna give you a good taste of lambda and what you can do with it.

Having said that, although that post gives a great insight into getting started with AWS lambda, but is far from perfect in terms of what you would expect in real life.

In real life, you won’t be creating a lambda function in console. The best way to create and manage lambda function is by using SAM or Serverless Application Model.

And that’s why, I am here with this tutorial.

What we are gonna do today?

We are going to setup local development environment on a windows 10 system. And, we will do that using SAM or Serverless Application Model. For your information, SAM is nothing but an open source framework for building serverless applications.

More on that here: All You Need to Know About AWS SAM

Once environment is setup, we will create a Node.js lambda function. We will expose this lambda function to internet using an API Gateway endpoint. Once deployed to AWS cloud, we will test the endpoint and complete this tutorial.

Prerequisite

An AWS Account
An Admin User With Access/Secret Key
Admin rights on local system to install software
Basic Knowledge of SAM and Node.js

Steps to Build a Node.js Serverless Application using AWS SAM

Install Node.js Runtime
Install and Configure AWS CLI
Install SAM CLI
Install Git
Create a New Serverless Project
Understanding the Created Project
Build the Application
Deploy Your Serverless Application to Cloud
Verify the Serverless Application
Clean Up

Step 1: Install Node.js Runtime

In this tutorial, we are going to create Node.js lambda, so we will need node runtime to be installed on the system.

Go to official page of node.js and click on the MSI installer as per your system.

Once you click on the installer, go next-next and finish the installation. Below are the things that gets installed as part of it-

Verify Node Installation

node -v

Step 2: Install and Configure AWS CLI

AWS SAM is gonna use AWS CLI credentials to send API requests to AWS. So you should install AWS CLI on your system and configure it using access key/secret key of your user which has all the permission for this tutorial. It’s good to go ahead with an admin user.

To check if you already have AWS CLI setup, you can use below command-

aws configure list

As you can see in above screenshot, for me it’s showing none. Therefore, I will setup my CLI using below command-

aws configure

one you hit enter, it will ask you details like access key, secret key, region etc. Provide these information one by one and you are done.

In case you need help in setting up CLI, I have a tutorial for you : How to Install and Configure AWS CLI on Windows

Step 3: Install SAM CLI

We will use AWS SAM CLI to create, build and deploy a serverless application to AWS. Before that, lets install AWS SAM CLI

I am installing SAM CLI on windows and its super simple. All I need to do is Click on this MSI installer.

SAM CLI Installer : Installer

As soon as you click on this, installer is downloaded. After that just install it by clicking next next.

Verify SAM CLI Installation

sam --version

SAM CLI is installed successfully.

Step 4 : Install Git

In the next step, we will be creating a SAM project using sam init. For this command to work, you must have git installed on your system.

And, the reason is it downloads a sample project from github if you don’t have git installed, it is going to fail.

Install git from here : Install Git on Windows

To install on Linux of Mac OS just follow instructions here

Verify Git Installation

Step 5: Create a New Serverless Project

We will use command-

sam init

Navigate to folder in which you would like to create your application and then fire sam init command

You will be prompted for a series of questions . Provide your answers like below-

Which template source would you like to use? : AWS Quick Start Templates
Choose an AWS Quick Start application template: Hello World Example
Use the most popular runtime and package type? (Nodejs and zip) [y/N]: y
Project name [sam-app]: demo-node-app
Below is a screenshot for you in case you need any help.

Step 6: Understanding the Created Project

Project is created and if you want to check what all is created, just cd into the project directory and fire a command to list files.

# Navigate into the project directory
cd demo-node-app 

#listing files on linux or mac
ls -a

#listing files on windows
dir

I am on windows. So I will use below command-


# Navigate into the project directory
cd demo-node-app 

#listing files
dir

There are two important files that we need to understand

template.yml
app.js # Inside hello-world folder

Let’s take a look at each one of them and try to understand.

template.yml

This template.yml contains all the resource that we are gonna create on AWS. In our case, it case a lambda function and an API Gateway.

It also contains few outputs like API Gateway endpoint URL, function ARN and role ARN. After the deployment these will get printed in the CLI and you can use them for further process like testing the API Gateway endpoint.

AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09'
Transform: AWS::Serverless-2016-10-31
Description: >
  demo-node-app

  Sample SAM Template for demo-node-app

Globals:
  Function:
    Timeout: 3

Resources:
  HelloWorldFunction:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      CodeUri: hello-world/
      Handler: app.lambdaHandler
      Runtime: nodejs14.x
      Architectures:
        - x86_64
      Events:
        HelloWorld:
          Type: Api 
            Path: /hello
            Method: get

Outputs:
  HelloWorldApi:
    Description: "API Gateway endpoint URL for Prod stage for Hello World function"
    Value: !Sub "https://${ServerlessRestApi}.execute-api.${AWS::Region}.amazonaws.com/Prod/hello/"
  HelloWorldFunction:
    Description: "Hello World Lambda Function ARN"
    Value: !GetAtt HelloWorldFunction.Arn
  HelloWorldFunctionIamRole:
    Description: "Implicit IAM Role created for Hello World function"
    Value: !GetAtt HelloWorldFunctionRole.Arn

In case you are thinking that, hey I don’t see any API Gateway resource here.

Well, it’s part of lambda and is represented by below section

      Events:
        HelloWorld:
          Type: Api 
            Path: /hello
            Method: get

It means it is going to create a single get endpoint represented by /hello.

app.js

You will find app.js inside hello-world folder.

app.js contains the actual lambda handler that will be called when someone calls this lambda.

For example, when API Gateway is going to call HelloWorld lambda, this lambdaHandler method will be called and a response of “hello world” is gonna be returned as specified in the below code of course along side the statusCode.

API Gateway kind of expects response in this format and if you try to deviate from it you might end up in 502 errors from API gateway.

let response;

exports.lambdaHandler = async (event, context) => {
    try {
        response = {
            'statusCode': 200,
            'body': JSON.stringify({
                message: 'hello world',
            })
        }
    } catch (err) {
        console.log(err);
        return err;
    }

    return response
};

Step 7: Build the Application

Our project is created, so lets build them to create a deployment package.

We are already inside project directory, so lets fire build command like below-

sam build

Step 8: Deploy Your Application to Cloud

We'll use below command to deploy it to AWS Cloud

sam deploy --guided

You will again be prompted with a lot of questions. Answer them per below screenshot. In case you don’t want to provide value for a particular question, just hit enter and it will take it’s default value.

After that it shows the change set that it is deploying. Verify the change set and enter y to go ahead with the deployment.

It takes some time to create resources. After a while I got the message that :

Successfully created/updated stack – hello-world-cloudkatha in eu-west-1

All the outputs of stack are shown below. We'll need HelloWorldApi value which is the API Gateway endpoint to test in further steps.

**
API Gateway Endpoint:** https://dqybwb0a7f.execute-api.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/Prod/hello/

Step 9: Verify the Serverless Application

We already have the endpoint URL from previous step. Lets hit the endpoint URL in browser and you will see-

Congratulations !!!

You have successfully created , build and deployed a Node.js serverless application into AWS.

Step 10: Clean Up

If you check in AWS CloudFormation console, you will see that SAM creates your application stack which is hello–world-cloudkatha in our case. You can simply delete the stack if you don’t want these resources anymore.

First stack is what we created for our lambda function. Second one is SAM default stack that has been created by SAM and it contains two resources.

You only need to create stack for your resources as second one is part of SAM setup and will be needed when you created other projects.

In case you will want to delete the stack from CLI use below command:

aws cloudformation delete-stack --stack-name hello-world-cloudkatha --region eu-west-1

Conclusion:

In this post, we learnt to Build a Node.js Serverless Application using AWS SAM. We did setup our local environment with SAM and then we created, build and deployed the application on AWS Cloud.

After deploying, we tested the generated API Gateway endpoint URL to see if everything worked as expected. If you have any doubt, please feel free to drop a question in comment section.

Reach out to me on Twitter or Checkout CloudKatha for more articles from me.

4 Main Factors to Consider When Choosing Your AWS Region

Preeti Pragya — Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:35:16 +0000

Dear reader, I hope you are doing great. I am sure, you already know that , now a days cloud is the go to choice for all size of business to deploy their workload.

Your favorite applications such as Gmail, Netflix , Amazon prime, Dropbox, Reddit etc. are all in cloud.

And why not?

Cloud Computing offers numerous benefits as compared to the on premises server. And when it comes to cloud, I am a big fan of AWS and it’s vast range of services.

About AWS – Amazon Web Services

AWS or Amazon Web Services is a cloud service provider. It provides more then 200 services globally which can be used to develop scalable and cost effective cloud based applications.

AWS global infrastructure is vast and consists of 81 Availability Zones within 25 geographic regions around the world. They also have plans for 27 more Availability Zones and 9 more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and United Arab Emirates (UAE)

One of the first and most important thing while executing your project in AWS cloud is to choose appropriate region. Well you don’t or should not choose it randomly. Rather there are factors to consider while choosing AWS region for your workload.

In case you are beginner and don’t know what a region or availability zone is, here is a small explanation.

A bit about Region and Availability Zones

Region as the name suggest is a physical location in the world where AWS has it’s cluster of data centers. Each group of logical data centers is an Availability Zone. Each AWS Region consists of multiple, isolated, and physically separate AZs within a geographic area.

Data center(S) -> Availability Zone -> Region

Regions are usually named after the geographic location it is located in. For example- Ireland

Availability zones are also isolated from each other and can help you deploy a highly available architecture by putting your servers in different availability zones. So that your app can even survive an AZ failure altogether.

When using AWS services, most of the services are region scoped and you need to choose a region to proceed with. you choose a region to store your data or to do computation. AWS always stores your data in your specified region and your data stays there as long as you want.

In today’s post, I will explain how to choose best region for your workload on AWS.

1. Legal Requirement

There are times when you have compliance requirement that data should stay in particular country or continent to abide by the local law. In this case this parameter is gonna override any other evaluation factor. You should choose appropriate region to meet the compliance requirement.

2. Latency

If your users belong to a specific location/area, it makes sense to deploy your workload in a region that is closer to your user base for lower latency/better performance.

Usually the nearer is the location , lower is the latency and better. However, I would suggest, not to go by just proximity rather do ping test on your servers to see which region gives lowest latency and choose accordingly.

3. Cost

Do you know that AWS services usually costs differently in different regions. AWS says “We charge more where our costs are more and vice versa“. Therefore, choosing a region that costs less can save you few bucks in case you don’t have any other requirement such as latency to your users or any regulatory /compliance requirement. Once you know your technology/services stack, use AWS price calculator and evaluate a region that costs you less.

4. Service Availability

When new services are launched they are usually launched in few bigger regions. And it makes sense as AWS takes time to test the service in different regions before rolling them out in all the regions.

For example if you use CloudShell which provides you a browser based shell where you can run command. At the moment it is only available in few regions mentioned in AWS page here

But it doesn’t mean that if it is not available in your region you can’t use it. Simply switch region to of the supported region and Voila !!!!

So feel free to use a region where the service you require is available.

Conclusion

In this post, We learnt about factors to consider when choosing your AWS region. When it comes to choosing the best region for your workload, there is no single answer. Instead, it varies based on your requirements such as latency , cost , service Availability or complaints requirements.

Hope that was clear enough for you to make decision. Feel free to let me know in case of questions on twitter.

For more such informative content, you can checkout my blog CloudKatha.