serverless-patterns VS serverless-offline

You may be aware of Serverlessland, a treasure trove of developer-centered content and examples of serverless applications. I decided to take one of their more popular (and AI-focused) tutorials, titled “Use GenAI capabilities to build a chatbot”, and recreate it with App Composer and our trusty AI assistant. Here we go!

Serverless Land is a place with a ton of serverless resources.

If you're looking for examples, you can check out my GitHub, it's full of SAM templates that cover a wide range of use cases. Serverless Land is another fantastic resource full of reference material. If you are trying to build something but can't quite figure it out in SAM, remember - it's all just CloudFormation. Browse the docs to see how to define that stubborn resource.

I will use dynamodb-streams-to-eventbridge-outbox-pattern by David Boyne as an example.

This is definitely not the most common pattern. As an independent data point, you can look at the AWS-maintained serverlessland.com, where ALL the patterns that include SNS and SQS are going SNS > SQS.

For all my associated exams I used Mareek/TD, labs and for SAP also went through SAP course of A. Cantrill, also tools like https://serverlessland.com/ and aws event talks on YouTube can help you understand concepts.

For serverless, serverlessland.com

If you’re using AWS serverlessland is maintained by AWS and has great resources

Using local emulators like sam local, serverless-offline, localstack, etc.

Hi, I'm the creator of serverless-offline (https://github.com/dherault/serverless-offline), a NPM package for local serveless development on AWS.

I'm building a cool product and intend to launch Q1 2023. To gain traction from my target customers, I plan to place a discrete ad at the launch of every serverless-offline instance.

Does it seem like an ok move to you? Or is it something that repels you?

Best,

As the creator of serverless-offline, I am well placed to tell you that this is the time-effective solution. Plus, it costs way less than other solutions at smaller scales. But, again, going Kubernetes or otherwise will be a problem for the future.

https://github.com/dherault/serverless-offline https://github.com/lambci/docker-lambda

What if I didn’t need to push code to AWS every time I wanted to test something? All heroes don’t wear capes. Like a knight in shining armor, Serverless Offline comes barging in to save the day! At least now I can test all my code locally before pushing it to AWS. That’s a relief.

With classic Express servers, you can use a simple node script to get the server up and running to test locally. Serverless wants to be run in the AWS ecosystem making it. Lucky for us, David Hérault has built and continues to maintain serverless-offline allowing us to emulate our functions locally before we deploy.

With the serverless offline plugin you can speed up local dev is by emulating AWS lambda and API Gateway locally when developing your Serverless project.

Those mocks are by definition not real services so there are some behavior differences between the local environment and the cloud provider. For example, AWS API Gateway emulated by serverless-offline doesn't handle VTL locally the same as AWS does.

serverless-offline (https://github.com/dherault/serverless-offline) is a great tool to use for local development of serverless applications.

It's not a complete mirror image of what you get but it's close enough in my experience.