goldstack VS serverless-application-model

I don't want to spend a lot of time discussing his specific example, except to say that if you are worried about "extensive configuration," and you deploy your serverless apps with Terraform or raw CloudFormation, you are going to have a bad time. If you use an IaC generator like Serverless Framework, you can have a serverless app running in production in an hour.

Infrastructure Complexity: Serverless computing emerged as a simplified approach to application development, but the infrastructure it requires can be unexpectedly complex. Tasks like setting up an API gateway with Lambdas can result in extensive configuration, increasing brittleness and the learning curve for developers.

I completed the upgrade and released this in version 0.5.0 of Goldstack.

If you have any question or comments, please reach out or raise an issue 🤗.

Thus, I started the process of developing a server-side rendering friendly template a few months ago. I released this template a while ago and have since also completed the implementation of the new version of my blog. This post contains my experiences and learnings from this process.

For any suggestions, ideas and comments, please be welcome to head to GitHub and create an issue 🤗.

See a full source code example here: lambdaCompression.ts

The above template and boilerplate are regularly updated and automatically tested (project install & standing up infrastructure). If you nonetheless encounter any problems, please raise an issue on GitHub.

Consider helping out making this template better for others by raising an issue in GitHub if you encounter any problems or have questions or ideas.

The above assumes that there is a local .aws/config and/or .aws/credentials file present. Note that the AWS credentials in awsUser can be initialised in many different ways, see the file awsUserUtils.ts for reference or the AWS documentation on Setting SDK Credentials in Node.js.

The complete solution with SAM is available here.

There are many options to deploy Serverless Applications in AWS and one of them is SAM, the Serverless Application Model. I chose to use it here, because it doesn't add too many layers of abstraction between what's being deployed and the code we write and our infrastructure is quite simple.

The solution uses AWS SAM with the global configuration for Lambda functions and the public API you can use to access Apache Zeppelin. The stack deployment provides the URL as an output value.

When you combine this with the AWS Serverless Application Model you can also very easily include your dependencies. Or use a compiled language like golang for your Lambda functions. You simply run sam build before you run the aws cloudformation package and aws cloudformation deploy commands. SAM will build the binary and update the template to point to the newly built binary. Package will then upload it to S3 and replace the local reference to the S3 location. Deploy can then create or update the stack or you can use the CloudFormation integration in CodePipeline.

I'm a big fan of using an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach for any project. My go to tools for this are the Servlerless Application Model (SAM) and it's associated CLI (SAM CLI). For more official use cases and for cross platform apps I typically use Terraform.

AWS SAM

Kicking off the tour and not starting a war, but I'm going to be using the Serverless Application Model.

The diagram here is super simple. I'm going to write something a little later that shows how this code could fit into a bigger workflow, but for now, I'm keeping it basic. And yes, that's the SAM Squirrel in there.

Interestingly, AWS CDK and SAM are both explicitly mentioned. While CDK broadly addresses Infrastructure as Code, SAM is highlighted for its role in developing serverless data pipelines - a hugely underrated concept.

Naturally, there are several options available to declare your cloud resources. The options with the most popularity are the CDK, AWS CloudFormation, SST, Serverless framework, Terraform, and AWS SAM. There are others, but when talking about Infrastructure as Code (IaC), these are the ones you hear about most often.