AWS Developer: Serverless Architecture and Monitoring

Course Overview
Hi everyone, my name is Ryan Lewis, and welcome to my course, AWS Developer: Serverless Architecture and Monitoring. I've been architecting and creating serverless applications in AWS for many years in my work for large enterprises as a senior engineer. Amazon Web Services started the serverless revolution after launching Lambda in 2014, and it's still the best place to create distributed serverless applications. AWS continues to innovate in the field of serverless, and has also introduced some incredibly powerful services for monitoring any kind of web application. As improved tooling and support services for applications continue to be introduced, AWS is cementing itself as the platform of choice for most enterprise companies. In this course, we are going to go deep into both of those topics, serverless architecture and monitoring. We'll architect an application using many of AWS's most popular services, and then configure monitoring to be able to keep an eye on everything. Some of the major topics that we will cover include improving performance, stability, and security with AWS Lambda; configuring serverless event sources such as API Gateway and Kinesis; monitoring applications with AWS X-Ray; and creating CloudWatch alarms to monitor serverless applications. By the end of this course, you'll have a new understanding of how to build and deploy serverless applications and monitor any application in AWS. Before beginning the course, you should have a good understanding of AWS services and have some experience using them. I hope you'll join me on this journey to master Amazon Web Services with the AWS Developer: Serverless Architecture and Monitoring course, at Pluralsight.

Going Serverless in AWS with Lambda
Hi there, and welcome back to AWS Developer: Serverless Architecture and Monitoring. This module is going to be all about Lambda, Amazon's core component of serverless applications. Lambda satisfies the computing pillar of any serverless application, and is likely the reason the serverless name really caught on, since there's no real server configuration with Lambda. In this module, we won't be going over specifics about writing Lambda code. There are some other great courses on Pluralsight that cover this topic, and skipping this content allows us to focus more on Lambda configuration and specifics. If you want to learn more about writing these functions, take a look at these courses at Pluralsight. Let's take a look at what we'll cover in this module. We'll start by deploying our demo application using the serverless framework. This is going to create many of the resources we'll use later in this course to get hands-on experience with serverless architecture. Next, we'll talk about how to design Lambda functions and the different monitoring metrics available. Then we'll discuss security, stability, and performance with Lambda functions. All of these concerns are typical for web applications, but there are some interesting peculiarities to be aware of when working specifically with Lambda. Finally, I'll introduce you to the serverless application model, an alternative to the serverless framework that's developed by AWS. Let's get started.

Sourcing Serverless Events in AWS with API Gateway and Kinesis
Hi there, and welcome back to AWS Developer: Serverless Architecture and Monitoring. This module is all about event sources for your serverless applications. Lambda functions are invoked in response to events, and since AWS has made many different AWS services accessible as event sources, your serverless applications can become expansive and powerful. Let's take a look at what we're going to learn in this module. First we'll talk about VPCs work with a serverless architecture, and different approaches for configuring your resources to communicate together. Then we'll create a VPC endpoint for our Kinesis stream, which will allow our lambdas to communicate with Kinesis without going outside of AWS. Next we'll take an overview of all the event source services you have at your fingertips in AWS. Then we'll configure one of those event sources, API Gateway, to add an endpoint for receiving Trash Panda actions from our client application. Once that endpoint is configured, we'll look at how you can secure your API Gateway endpoints by adding a custom authorizer. There are actually two categories of event sources in AWS, and we'll look at the difference between push and pull event sources. And finally, we'll configure a pull-type event source by hooking up a demo lambda function with a Kinesis stream. Let's gets started.

Monitoring Applications in AWS with X-Ray and CloudWatch
Hi there, and welcome back to AWS Developer: Serverless Architecture and Monitoring. In this module, we're going to focus on monitoring and look at a few ways to ensure your applications are working as expected. Monitoring also helps when troubleshooting issues that may crop up, and a newer AWS service called X-Ray will help troubleshoot issues with errors, latency or bottlenecks in both serverless applications and distributed web applications. Let's take a look at what we're covering in this module. We'll start by looking at the X-Ray service and understand how it works from a high level. Then we'll look specifically at tracing in X-Ray and understand the parts of a trace. Next, we'll implement X-Ray in our serverless application and see what it looks like in action. Then we'll create some CloudWatch alarms to bring attention to any blind spots in our application and ensure we're aware when things go awry. Finally, we'll spin down our demo application resources now that we're finished with them. Let's get started.