Beginner Question: Mutliple services using the same resources

Serverless Framework
1

Hi there,

sorry if my questions sounds stupid, or if it has been answered yet. I was searching Google, StackOverflow and this forum without success.

In the most simple terms I need to build the system like this:

  • CSV-file gets downloaded by FTP parsed and data save in a dynamodb
  • API provides read and update access to the data, data gets enriched by some users inputs (API is consumed by a WebClient)
  • enriched data is exported into another CSV-file to be downloaded

I thought it would be a good idea, to separate these concerns into 3 serverless-services containing one or more functions:

  • Import service (one scheduled function for downloading csv to s3, one function for parsing csv and (perhaps another one for) saving data to DynamoDB)
  • API service (at least one function to list data and one to update data)
  • Export service (one scheduled function to read updated data an export csv to s3)

From the serverless-framework documentation I understand that each service has it own resources. But on the other hand all those services (and their respektive functions) need the same DynamoDB tables.

So my questions:

  • Am I able to create some kind of shared resources?
  • And If so, how?
  • If not, I figured I put all my functions in the same serverless-service, right? If so, how am I able to at least put them in some kind of namespace to make the distinction clear?

Hope someone could shed some light on this.

Kind regards

2

You can create Services with no functions thanks to @johncmckim’s PR for your shared resources.

You would then set the shared resources’ details as variables and pass them off to your code with environment variables.

3

Thank your very much, for your response.

Okay, nice…I was thinking about an function-less service for the resources.

I’m not sure if I understand the documentation. What I figured:

  1. create a service name resources and in the resource/serverless.yml define the something like

    resources:
    Resources:
    myTable:
    Type: AWS::DynamoDB::Table
    Properties:
    TableName: {opt:stage}-MyTable

  1. in the say they api/serverless.yaml I reference it like

    functions:
    hello:
    handler: handler.hello
    environment:
    MY_TABLE_NAME: ${file(…/resources/serverless.yml):resources.Resources.myTable.Properties.TableName}

Optionally I would define custom variables in the resources/serveless.yml so the path to reference is a little shorter.
Did I get that more or less correctly?

Kind regard, thomas

P.S.:
I’m coming from In serverless 0.5.6. There were the CloudFormation-Outputs which were stored in _meta and could be used and referenced as environment variables. Especially when ARNs are needed this comes in handy, right?
Does serverless-1.x handle it in a similar way? Or how do I get the details in to variables and into the environment of the other services?

4

Hi, I was wondering the same thing did it work for you?

Thanks,