Help Getting Started

Serverless Architectures
1

Hello, I’m a fairly experienced programmer (mostly frontend), but I have very little experience with AWS services, let alone wiring them all together to get something going with Serverless. So forgive me if these are some stupid questions, but I’d really appreciate a jumpstart.

Basically what I want to build is a simple website with user authentication and posts. I plan on using create-react-app for the frontend so I don’t need much help there, but I don’t really know where to get started with the backend.

The features I’m looking for are:

  • login / signup with email
  • email verification
  • password recovery
  • create a post (with authentication)
  • view a user’s public profile

I’ve found some relevant examples from the Readme on Github but with my lack of familiarity with all these tools, I’m not really sure how to get started… Is it possible to set up all these AWS services (API Gateway, DynamoDB, RDS, IAM, CloudFormation, etc.) from the command line or do I need to go through the UI? It seems like Serverless does some of this setup, but not everything…

I think adoption would be a lot quicker if, in the documentation there were a primer on using AWS in general – how to set up a database, manage a database, create users, setup logging, and manage services from the command line. Otherwise, I’m just completely lost and will end up just using FeathersJS again… But Serverless looks awesome so I’d appreciate any help.

Thanks

Chet

2

Hi Chet,

I’m new here as well, although I’ve spent a bit more time on AWS than you have so I’m hoping I can help point you in the right direction on the back end. Given the sheer number of services available, it can be difficult to figure out where to get started with AWS but I highly recommend spending some time with some of their Getting Started tutorials, which tend to be quite good.

The simplest AWS service is S3, so I’d start there with this:

And then check out the AWS CLI on the same topic:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/s3/index.html#cli-aws-s3

Generally speaking, anything you can do through the AWS Console, you can do with the CLI. With that as a foundation, I’d do the Getting Started on Lambda.

Once you get through that, it’ll become clearer where the Serverless Framework ends and AWS begins.

—Pete

3

Hey @ccorcos,

One option for auth is aws cognito. (see an example here: https://github.com/danilop/LambdAuth ). I don’t think it will work out of the box w/ the framework: https://github.com/danilop/LambdAuth/issues/53

We use auth0 for easy auth setup. You can see that in action on https://serverless.com/ by clicking join beta. The implementation is open source here: https://github.com/serverless/site/blob/master/src/redux/user-middleware.js

For CRUD stuff, check out: @pmuens’s https://github.com/pmuens/serverless-crud project

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