As I was researching about making games with Javascript in my last blog, I have come across an interesting topic about the uprising serverless web application. While a lot of developers were struggling through their process of making the backend talk with their frontend properly or vice versa, serverless is actually helping lots of devs to save brain cells. And a very major fact for why companies have been switching over to serverless is because it takes less computing power and human resources to maintain the servers, databases, and backend logic.
Serverless web application allows developers to focus on frontend and the UX of the app instead of spending weeks and months working on infrastructure. There is also no need to worry about the scale and provision since it is built-in and is well taken care of. The tools that I came across for serverless web application is by the combination of AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Amplify, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Cognito.
AWS, which is Amazon Web Service, had built out an ecosystem of cloud-based backend with an architecture of 5 different components that will handle everything that a backend is responsible for. As the diagram follows shows(source from: here):
- AWS Amplify hosts static web resources including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image files which are loaded in the user’s browser.
- Amazon Cognito provides user management and authentication functions to secure the backend API.
- JavaScript executed in the browser sends and receives data from a public backend API built using Lambda and API Gateway.
- Amazon DynamoDB provides a persistence layer where data can be stored by the API’s Lambda function.
As all of the functionality of a backend being productively divided into these 5 components, the flexibility, scalability, and reliability of the app increase tremendously. A few other benefits include but are not limited to better server infrastructure, better speed, better support, better security and compatibility, more efficiency, lower cost compared to a traditional server backend, Eco-friendly for hosting and computing, etc.
On AWS they also have a complete tutorial that walks you through how to set up a simple Serverless web application, where it is basically free and you only need to sign up an account with AWS, have a text editor installed and ready to use of your choice, and also a chrome browser. I am interested in completing this tutorial after I graduated from my coding Bootcamp, I believe it will be a very useful topic to know since having more understanding of the new and on-trend technology will always help you catch up and stay on top with how technologies evolve every day.
Thanks for reading my blog! Hoped you enjoyed it~ I’m pretty burnt out from the current project week hence this drop dead kitty gif to show my current state:
Take care and stay safe everyone!
