Serverless Workshop

The term “Serverless” seems to be used everywhere and Serverless Functions, Functions as a Service (FaaS) and/or Lambda are taking the cloud by storm (pun intended). What are Serverless Functions and what's all the fuss? During this workshop, we'll build a Serverless Web Service, add an API management layer and database, all using Serverless computing options; it will be a 100% Serverless application.

Here's what we'll build together:

• Create a simple web service, written in Python, using the Flask framework. This will enable you to build, test and debug the application in your local development environment, no cloud side resources needed.
• Next, we'll use GitLab and a GitLab Runner to create a Continuous Integration environment.
• With a working model in place, we'll add cloud side resources to your application and use the Moto to mock out AWS resources for your tests.
• With our application built, we'll focus on the other services needed to make this a Serverless application. We will use Hashicorp Terraform to define our infrastructure.
• We'll use Localstack to stand-up cloud side resources locally, via Terraform.
• Next we'll update our GitLab tests to use LocalStack and Terraform
• Finally, we'll deploy our application to AWS.
• As we wrap up the workshop, we'll take a short tour of the AWS console and how to access all the resources created by Terraform.
• One last thing… what do we do with all these cloud side resources? Before you leave, we'll use Terraform to teardown it all down.

At the end of this workshop, you will have a good understanding of what Serverless computing is, how to build an all Serverless application, how to navigate the AWS console and a blueprint for future Python and Terraform projects.

Prerequisites

• Python experience, enough to build a basic, “hello world” application.
• Experience with Pipenv
• “Infrastructure as Code” presentation or equivalent experience with Hashicorp Terraform
• “Serverless” presentation or equivalent experience building an AWS Lambda

About Chris Maki

Chris is the founder and Chief Architect of Rip City Software, a company dedicated to Java Microservices and building systems in AWS. He has more than 20 years of experience creating web scale enterprise systems. Throughout his career, Chris has been a user group leader, speaker, and author. He's passionate about inclusive leadership, empowering teams, focusing on differentiated work and streamlining the development, testing and deployment process.

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