First End-to-End AWS Project

October 23, 2024

I’d like to share a couple of ideas based on this project that I built by following a video by ‘Tiny Technical Tutorials’ which is my first exposure to an AWS-centered project that uses more than just a couple of services to architect a full-stack application. I thought this would be worth a recap because, aside from learning a new thing or two about some services, it triggered some thoughts that will probably affect my future learning and interactions with AWS.

The next section summarizes the project to give you some context, and following one has my own comments and thoughts.

Architecture Overview

Generally speaking, here are the individual pieces involved in this app (the architecture of which is displayed in the cover photo):

Application Code

• A front-end app built by vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and configured to work with Cognito and API Gateway.
• The source code is hosted on a GitHub repository.

Amplify

• I call it AWS’s attempt at making a hands-off platform-as-a-service like Netlify. It may or may not be more than that, but at least it was used this way in this project’s scope.
• It was configured to deploy from the project’s GitHub repo and re-deploy automatically after any new commits.

Cognito

• That’s the service responsible for holding the “user pool” and handling the authentication functionality (password policy, sending emails with verification codes, etc.).

API Gateway

• It acts like a REST API with an endpoint that receives HTTP requests, runs the specified Lambda function, and returns the response (not to indicate that API Gateway can only be used for that).
• Since the tutorial built the project using the UI console, this step in particular felt like a “ClickOps” way of building a RESTful backend (more on that later).

Lambda

• A single serverless function was written to execute some back-end logic that involves writing to a DynamoDB table.

DynamoDB

• This is a key-value NoSQL database.
• Only a single table is used in this app, which the Lambda function writes to.

My Thoughts

Like I said, this has been my first exposure to a full-stack application whose architecture is built end-to-end with AWS services. Compared to my previous interactions with the cloud, this one triggers two main ideas.

Replacing the Monolith with AWS Services

I was coming into AWS looking forward to this in particular, which is how individual parts of the back-end functionality of an application can be split and handed to a separate AWS service. Here is how I feel that happened in this project by attempting to make a mapping between parts of a typical back-end functionality in a monolith and the AWS services that “replace” them in this project.

Of course, just like back-end development frameworks and design patterns, there is usually more than one way to architect an app on AWS, especially with the huge number of services (and features per service) that are available. So, the more I learn and understand, the more flexibility I’ll gain when it comes to setting an app’s architecture.

The Need for Infrastructure-as-Code

Racking up more services for an application gets unwieldy pretty quickly, and that application isn’t even that complicated, not by a long shot. What makes things worse is that (to my knowledge) I see no apparent notion of an “application” that groups individual services: an app’s DynamoDB table would be one among multiple unrelated ones in the DynamoDB console dashboard, and the same goes for Lambda functions, IAM roles, or any other resource.

So, this project ended up being a huge motivation for me to learn IaC (probably Terraform) and use it for my future projects. It should serve as a sort of central documentation/config for all resources that are needed to run a certain application, not to mention the obvious benefit of automating all the pointing and clicking in the console. It is something extra to learn and get used to for sure, but I feel that the ROI is worth it at this point.

Final Notes

Not much effort went into this project because I was following a step-by-step tutorial. However, it was a bit of an eye-opener when it comes to grokking AWS as a platform for building full-stack applications. That doesn’t mean I now truly grok AWS, but it definitely felt like a step in the right direction after seeing AWS services that cover the whole stack and developing a first-hand understanding of how IaC can be beneficial.

Thank you for reading!

Cover image is taken from the same tutorial.