Lessons Learned From Building My First Serverless Application

I recently attended an Amazon Workshop at a conference where I built my first serverless application. The application allows you to view, add and remove conference sessions to create a custom schedule.

The application used S3 to store the static file, DynamoDB to hold the conference sessions, Lambda to run the functions (UpdateSessions, GetSessions and AddSessions and API Gateway to create a custom API to trigger the functions.

I’ve learned a lot! It was rewarding to be able to add or remove sessions from my personalized calendar and understand how the components work.

My lessons learned:

1. Test as you go and verify your tests. Make sure your Lambda functions populate your tables etc. This saves you time if there is an error or something doesn’t work as expected.
2. Understand how components work independently and together. I accidentally created my DynamoDb table in the N.Virginia region whereas my function was in the N.California region. I had to recreate my table in N.California region as the table didn’t exist to my Lambda function.
3. Lambda is super cool! I definitely want to focus my energy on utilizing this AWS Service. Lambda offers a lot of capabilities and was easy to use. It feels good to use and understand something you have built.

I will be building applications featured on the Amazon Compute Evolved Week Workshops. I will be using Amazon Lightsail and then buidling another application using Lambda. More to come but these lessons learned will help me as build other application!