This one-day tutorial walks you through with the Serverless Framework. It is intended for people already familiar with JavaScript and preliminary Node.js knowledge.

After this tutorial, you should:

• Be able to create a Serverless service on your own
• Know what happens under the hood in AWS and in Serverless framework
• Have a simple, but testable and production ready service

Supplementary material:

• Serverless Computing presentation: https://bit.ly/2m8vqUV
• Cheat Sheet: Cheatsheet

• Node.js installed (the tutorial uses v7.5.0)
• Personal AWS account
• A HTTP client (the tutorial uses Postman)
• Serverless 1.X installed (the tutorial uses 1.7.0)

Goal: Get to know Serverless CLI and how it plays with AWS. We create a simple Serverless service.

Demo:

• Configure the environment
• Create run, deploy & delete a Serverless function
• Create a HTTP(S) endpoint
• Peek into Serverless YAML configuration
• Peek under the hood: What happened in AWS: Lambda, API Gateway, Cloudwatch

Exercise: Set up your own project, run, deploy!

• Configure your credentials
• Create a Hello, World that accepts input
• Invoke it remotely & over HTTPS - experiment with the data that API Gateway provides
• Deploy & monitor the logs when you call it
• Optional: Write error handler(s) supporting a few types of input
  • Path
  • JSON body
  • Query string

More information:

• Git branch 01-hello-world
• API Gateway proxy format

Goal: Learn to structure Serverless service so that it can scale for a few dozen services/endpoints.

Demo:

• Creating a sample project layout
• Calling remote services with request-promise-lite

Exercise: Modify your project layout, call remote services.

• Slackbot hook that does something
• Simple REST wrapper of your target API (Google Wiki with hard-coded credentials)

• (Optional: Create dev/test/alpha/prod stages)

More information:

• Git branch 02-large-project-layout
• Slack Slash commands

Goal: Understand Serveless plugin system and how everything in Serverless is actually a plugin. Peek into a few plugins that you will use in real life.

Demo:

• Storing secrets with serveress-secrets
• Minifying builds & supporting ES2015+ using Babel & Webpack with serverless-webpack
• Testing Serverless functions with serverless-jest

Exercise:

• Safe storage of your secrets
• Basic automated system tests of your app
• (Optimized bundle)

Notes:

• sls webpack serve does not work with Proxy Lambdas :(
• Lambda wrapper in serverless-jest-plugin only wraps Lambda body (no headers, paths etc.)
• Many npm modules will not tolerate web pack (will be solved in later exercise)

More information:

• Git branch 03-using-plugins
• serverless-secrets-plugin
• serverless-webpack-plugin
• serverless-jest-plugin
• AWS KMS
• JEST testing Framework

Demo:

• Creating a AWS RDS (Postgres) instance using CloudFormation
• Simple database migration script using Knex
• Reorganising your project so that it works with node modules that do not support webpack

Exercise:

• Create simple DAO connectivity for your service

Notes:

• This is the hardest session, because it opens all the gory details of Webpack incompatibilities, large module dependency graphs and CloudFormation failures
• Do not do CloudFormation in your individual exercises - you are provided with credentials.

More information:

• Git branch 04-serverless-cloudformation-db
• Knex and Objection DB wrappers
• CloudFormation templates

Goal: Understand that with some dirty tricks, you can create very-low cost web services using S3 and AWS Lambda.

Exercise:

• Finish your Slackbot
• (Write a simple web frontend as an alternative command channel, if the time permits)

Notes:

• There is no Git branch prepared - this is a walkthrough of AWS Squirrelbin sample

More information:

• AWS Squirrelbin sample