Developing Serverless Solutions on AWS

Course Description

Developing Serverless Solutions on AWS provides developers with deep exposure to building and managing applications using AWS Lambda and the broader AWS serverless platform. The course focuses on "learning how to learn," encouraging the use of official documentation to solve authentic development challenges. You will progress from simple function deployment to complex, multi-service architectures, learning how to handle state, idempotency, and concurrency. By the end of the 3-day session, you will be proficient in using AWS SAM and CDK to automate serverless deployments within a robust CI/CD pipeline.

Who is this course for

This course is intended for technical builders who have already mastered the basics of cloud development and are looking to eliminate the overhead of managing servers. It is specifically designed for:

• Developers who need to build highly scalable, event-driven web or data-processing backends.

• Software Architects evaluating the trade-offs of transitioning from monolithic or containerized microservices to serverless.

• DevOps Professionals tasked with automating serverless release cycles and monitoring application health.

Course Objectives

• Event-Driven Design: Apply best practices for designing serverless applications that react to system events.

• Lambda Optimization: Master advanced function development, including environment reuse, layers, error handling, and memory configuration.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Compare and use AWS SAM, CDK, Amplify, and CloudFormation to define your stack.

• Operational Excellence: Build deep observability and monitoring into applications to manage scaling and performance.

• Security & Scaling: Apply security best practices and identify methods to manage service quotas and high-concurrency workloads.

• Automated Deployment: Configure CI/CD workflows to automate the deployment and maintenance of serverless resources.

Prerequisites

• Required Knowledge: Familiarity with AWS Cloud architecture and development experience equivalent to the Developing on AWS course.

• Digital Training: Completion of AWS Lambda Foundations and Amazon API Gateway for Serverless Applications.

• Technical Background: Proficiency in at least one high-level programming language supported by Lambda.

Course outline

Section 1: Thinking Serverless

• Best practices for building modern serverless applications

• Event-driven design

• AWS services that support event-driven serverless applications

Section 2: API-Driven Development and Synchronous Event Sources

• Characteristics of standard request/response API-based web applications

• How Amazon API Gateway fits into serverless applications

• Try-it-out exercise: Set up an HTTP API endpoint integrated with a Lambda function

• High-level comparison of API types (REST/HTTP, WebSocket, GraphQL)

Section 3: Introduction to Authentication, Authorization, and Access Control

• Authentication vs. Authorization

• Options for authenticating to APIs using API Gateway

• Amazon Cognito in serverless applications

• Amazon Cognito user pools vs. federated identities

Section 4: Serverless Deployment Frameworks

• Overview of imperative vs. declarative programming for infrastructure as code

• Comparison of CloudFormation, AWS CDK, Amplify, and AWS SAM frameworks

• Features of AWS SAM and the AWS SAM CLI for local emulation and testing

Section 5: Using Amazon EventBridge and Amazon SNS to Decouple Components

• Development considerations when using asynchronous event sources

• Features and use cases of Amazon EventBridge

• Try-it-out exercise: Build a custom EventBridge bus and rule

• Comparison of use cases for Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) vs. EventBridge

• Try-it-out exercise: Configure an Amazon SNS topic with filtering

Section 6: Event-Driven Development Using Queues and Streams

• Hands-On Labs

• Hands-On Lab 1: Deploying a Simple Serverless Application

• Hands-On Lab 2: Message Fan-Out with Amazon EventBridge

• Development considerations when using polling event sources to trigger Lambda functions

• Distinctions between queues and streams as event sources for Lambda

• Selecting appropriate configurations when using Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) or Amazon Kinesis Data Streams as an event source for Lambda

• Try-it-out exercise: Configure an Amazon SQS queue with a dead-letter queue as a Lambda event source

Section 7: Writing Good Lambda Functions

• How the Lambda lifecycle influences your function code

• Best practices for your Lambda functions

• Configuring a function

• Function code, versions and aliases

• Try-it-out exercise: Configure and test a Lambda function

• Lambda error handling

• Handling partial failures with queues and streams

Section 8: Step Functions for Orchestration

• AWS Step Functions in serverless architectures

• Try-it-out exercise: Step Functions states

• The callback pattern

• Standard vs. Express Workflows

• Step Functions direct integrations

• Try-it-out exercise: Troubleshooting a Standard Step Functions workflow

Section 9: Observability and Monitoring

• Hands-On Labs

• Hands-On Lab 3: Workflow Orchestration Using AWS Step Functions

• Hands-On Lab 4: Observability and Monitoring

• The three pillars of observability

• Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Logs Insights

• Writing effective log files

• Try-it-out exercise: Interpreting logs

• Using AWS X-Ray for observability

• Try-it-out exercise: Enable X-Ray and interpret X-Ray traces

• CloudWatch metrics and embedded metrics format

• Try-it-out exercise: Metrics and alarms

• Try-it-out exercise: ServiceLens

Section 10: Serverless Application Security

• Security best practices for serverless applications

• Applying security at all layers

• API Gateway and application security

• Lambda and application security

• Protecting data in your serverless data stores

• Auditing and traceability

Section 11: Handling Scale in Serverless Applications

• Scaling considerations for serverless applications

• Using API Gateway to manage scale

• Lambda concurrency scaling

• How different event sources scale with Lambda

Section 12: Automating the Deployment Pipeline

• Hands-On Labs

• Hands-On Lab 5: Securing Serverless Applications

• Hands-On Lab 6: Serverless CI/CD on AWS

• The importance of CI/CD in serverless applications

• Tools in a serverless pipeline

• AWS SAM features for serverless deployments

• Best practices for automation

• Course wrap-up