AWS Lambda in Action: Event-driven serverless applications First Edition

An excellent guide that combines theory and practice really well to help get up to speed using Lambda quickly and responsibly. I also like the fact that all manning texts come with an ebook (pdf) so I don’t have to lug the physical copy around.

Fast paced study guide for AWS Lambda

There is some real meat on this book. Having node.js and prior aws experience will be a big benefit to digesting the content. Unless you have built multiple lambda authentication services and been building lambda functions triggered off of dynamodb and s3 for some time, you will probably gain some knowledge from reading this book. If you are a complete aws newbie your mileage may vary and this book could be hard to digest. Ch9-11 guide you through building an authentication and media sharing app, with aws cognito, aws s3, aws lambda, and aws dynamodb working in concert. It is worth your time to read through the code which is printed in the book and understand and see how the parts are linked and working together. Unfortunately after chapter 12 the book content thins out and becomes more like a high level aws whitepaper.Cons:Aws api gateway deserves more screen time. I’m still confused about how it works especially method request/response and integration request/responseAws cloud formation did not get more screen time. Cloud formation could have had a nice supporting part in the action of ch9-11, it would have provided a aws standardized way of deployment been more informative.The author should mention node.js versioning issues that can gum up chapter 5 (see manning book forum)I’ll give 4 stars just to stand out. 4.5 is deserved but it’s not perfect.

This is an excellent resource for getting started with serverless development .Prior to reading the book, I had the impression that AWS Lambda was just a one-trick-pony tool for building one-off utilities like automatic image thumbnail generation or adding small pieces of server-side glue code for mobile applications.In Chapter 1 my eyes were opened, as right from the beginning the book shows how you can create fully functional web and backend server equivalents just using the existing AWS services with Lambda to wire it all together with your own business logic.The author makes good use of diagrams to help visualize the flows between services throughout the book. The initial diagrams show how the interactions between AWS Events and Lambda functions can be chained together to create sophisticated flows. These flows are not that dissimilar to the flows you might already be familiar with from reactive programming styles.Chapter 2 quickly walks you through the process of building your obligatory Hello-World app and then subsequent chapters will progressively iterate to add more functionality, such as a web hooks and and security.The book assumes you don’t know very much about AWS beforehand and provides a basic introduction to some of the other related AWS services you’ll need in order to build non-trivial services. With over 80+ AWS services, no single book could ever possibly cover all of the AWS services you could might use with Lambda. Instead, this book concentrates on the services you are most likely to use with Lambda e.g IAM, Cognito, S3 etc.The book is divided into four main parts. Part 1 is a Getting Started guide. Part 2 is for Building and has a security theme (6 of the 8 chapters in this section are focused on security and authentication). Part 3 covers tools and strategies for Test, Deployment and Monitoring. Part 4 focuses on on integrations with external (non-AWS) services.Each of the chapters are quite dense with content, so it’s not something you can maybe read and walkthrough in a single lunchbreak. But the content is progressive, slowly building on the code you already know, so before you know it, you’ve got some reasonably comprehensive examples working. The examples provided are either in the NodeJS or Python languages, so a familiarity with either of those would be helpful but not essential. Each chapter ends with a well thought out exercise so you can hone your skills. This is a nice touch that I’d love to see in more books.The existing online documentation from Amazon on Lambda seems to concentrate mainly on either Reference-API themed pages or links to github examples. Both of these are certainly useful, but this book helps fill a void by actually showing you how to build up a Lambda based application from scratch and then secure it.If you’re considering using Lambda in a commercial enterprise, then this book will definitely help as it has lots of meaty examples and a strong focus on security throughout.

More than a reference, a well structured guide of creating a distributed system.This book is all about serverless in action in a very structured way.Starting with the description of AWS lambda and Amazon API Gateway and focusing on building event-driven applications, this book teach you how to optimize your DevOps work-flow, and describes ways you can integrate Lambda functions with services outside of the AWS platform.The authentication and authorization functionalities are very well described in few chapters.The author shows how to implement a media-sharing application using a serverless and event-driven architecture, with exercises and solutions to practice the concepts learned on every chapter.He is teaching you how to choose the right service in the AWS platform, such as Amazon S3, DynamoDBand and AWS IAM.So you can learn the skills to design and implement an event-driven application, which helps you in designing the technical implementation of an event-driven architecture using AWS Lambda to react to coordinated events in the back end.I specially liked the chapter 12, which teachs you how event-driven architectures work, and how that relates to architectural best practices for distributed systems, such asreactive programming and microservices.And the very important part of how to estimate AWS Lambda costs for an event-driven application and use that information to design your business model.A book designed to helps you in all the process of creating a distributed system with a huge infrastructure behind you with no cost.